Commonwealth Games are really fun and friendly - would recommend your city hosting them! (Also we need to have it that legally they must be live on BBC 1)

Just saw the Odyssey - lots of thoughts, all positive! Genuinely think Nolan could now make an Aeneid sequel if he wanted to do so - with a shell-shocked Aeneas learning how he, and the Trojan refugees have to learn to live in a world where the laws of Zeus are shattered!

Something deeply symbolic about the state of Scotland's paths about this "To Old Friends" bench being broken in such a way no-one can sit on it!

The traditional site where Thomas the Rhymer was taken away by the Queen of the Fairies. "True Thomas lay on Huntlie bank, A ferlie he spied wi’ his e’e, And there he saw a lady bright Come riding down by the Eildon tree."

Wasn't expecting this walk to include Final Fantasy style random encounters!

Safely made my commute through "lawless" Glasgow - and after fighting my way through the zombie hordes, out-racing the cannibal biker gangs and escaping from the gaping maw of a traction city I discovered that the worst possible thing has happened. Glasgow has fallen to the French!

I guess it's probably for the best that vicars are no longer allowed to carry cudgels!

Not a fan of the new Copilot banner in Microsoft Word. What makes it worse is that all the evidence shows that people find it easier to start writing in a box with text - then they do a blank page; so lots of people will be "nudged" to use Copilot rather than use their own words.

We talk about the New Towns but I am fascinated about those in the "Glasgow Overspill" who ended up in Turiff, Macduff & Wick. (And since they had their own burgh councils the arrival of new populations from Glasgow would have been agreed by the local democratic institutions)

It's not a good sign when the Scottish Parliament is actively posting about cuts on LinkedIn!

Book 13 of 2026 Honestly thought I would enjoy Small is Beautiful more then I did but a lot of the work is dedicated to a world system which wouldn't exist a mere handful of years after publication in 1973. Did really enjoy the chapters on community and employee ownership though.

Writers Museum in Edinburgh is a great little place- where else can you see Robert Burn's writing desk or Sir Walter Scott's slippers? (Friends of mine will be pleased to know I'm not using the picture of me pointing at the slippers on the dating apps!)

Book 11 of 2026 and did somebody say they wanted essays from January 1989 on the prospects of a Scottish Constitutional Convention where a good chunk of them are "devolution will never happen?" There's some gems - Bernard Crick, David Martin and Christopher Harvie's essays - but wow it is dry!

Me: Love the new Park Run app which let's you see all the runs you've done on a map. Friend: I guess that explains why you've been our more. Me: What do you mean? Friend: Well now you've now got a Pokedex to fill up! Bluesky, I was devastated by the truth of their statement!

First Jane Austen I've read and by the last couple of chapters was starting to worry things weren't going to all work out. Basically the antidote to having already read Wuthering Heights this May!

Starting the long weekend in the most cliche Glasgow Southside way possible!

Some ominous foreshadowing in this introduction to a collection of essays on the Claim of Right for Scotland (1988)

Did I enjoy reading Wuthering Heights? Hard to say. Did I feel compelled to finish Wuthering Heights because there is something incredibly magnetic about the story? Absolutely.

Finished All Hallow's Eve by Charles Williams Definitely a classic in the supernatural thriller genre - it helps when the author was a practicing occultist for the magical rite sequences.

After Ramsey Macdonald was "cancelled" by forming the National Government of 1931 basically the entirety of the great and the good of Unionist & Tory Scotland held a massive birthday party in honour of him. So basically he had the exact same post-cancellation experience as any podcaster in 2026.