Duncan Harley

A friend keeps a Saturday paper for me and in return I keep him copies of the Times Crossword. I think it is a good bargain. At least I hope so since I have never completed a sudoku much less a crossword in my life. Seemingly those Bletchley Park heroes were chosen from aficionados who could complete a Times puzzle in something less than three minutes. I am guessing that the war was won not just by troops on the ground but by folk in huts pinpointing targets and first-guessing enemy actions. My old mum would probably have agreed. As a WAAF radar operative in that Hitler war she scanned the skies for signs of enemy bombers arriving from Norway. In four years of service, she only saw the one and recalled reporting the sighting to the sergeant who, disgracefully, took his time over a mug of Bovril before calling in the local Hurricanes, thus allowing the insurgent time to get away back to Trondheim. She rarely spoke about her war service except to say that once she was charged wi...

All they ever really wanted to do was raise some cash to buy a settee for the local cancer ward but when word got out that Rylstone & District Women's Institute were planning a Pirelli style Christmas calendar, things soon spiralled out of control. It’s a well-worn tale. A bevy of rural friends decide to publish a fund-raiser for cancer support following a death. John has died of non-Hodgkin lymphoma and wife Angela’s pals at the Rylstone & District Women's Institute set about creating a wall calendar as something for her to focus on during this most difficult time.  However, instead of the familiar Women’s Institute images of sheep infested landscapes, ecclesiastical spires and cricketed village greens, they decide to bare all. The 1998 launch of the raunchy publication attracted widespread press coverage and very soon the print run reached into the tens of thousands. A book and a film followed along with international fame. Described as a group of ordinary ladie...

Today brings news that the Scottish Government has rejected the advice of its own planning reporter and turned down a proposal by Mexican multi-national conglomerate Cemex to extend an existing aggregate quarry on land bordering the UNESCO listed Falls of Clyde upstream from New Lanark. New Lanark is best known as the site of a social experiment set up by Robert Owen.  Owen, a mill-owner come social reformer, had seen first hand the results of the abuse of the labour force in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution and formed the opinion that better conditions would improve production as well as improving the lives of the workers in the cotton mills. Robert Owen's big view was that a “permanent cause of distress was to be found in the competition of human labour with machinery and that the only effective remedy was the united action of men and the subordination of machinery.” Between 1799 and 1813 he improved the lot of the workforce at New Lanark. He introdu...

I was sent a copy of Hamish’s Railway a few months ago and it stood for a while on my dusty shelf alongside a few books and discs needing a review. I should have known better than to ignore the music. Various of the books amongst the pile will never make it onto either the Times list or the Waterstone shelves and god only knows why the publishers send me them. I must be on some difficult writers list. I digress. Hamish, or his agent, has been sending me his work for a few years and in the Leopard/Aberdeen Voice days, I reviewed positively alongside the music of other folk such as Thran Backwoods poet Gordon Duthie. Gordon makes music in his bedroom and broadcasts it all around the world. I've ranted on about his music many a time and in the course of ploughing through some glossy copies of Leopard Magazine dating from early 2015 I recalled that we met up in Kintore to have tea and scones before heading off to the local graveyard to do a photo-shoot alongside the Pictis...

It's maybe just a few weeks till the annual anniversary of the demise of Bob Smith. I am always ahead of the game and just thought that you might be happy to remember the splendid man.  Bob famously spent a latter career slaving over adverts for an uncaring local paper and was a fierce critic of Donald Trump. He would never miss an opportunity to mention Trump in his popular poems, which featured weekly in Aberdeen Voice. He features in my two books along with the likes of Wallace, Bruce, Byron and T.E. Lawrence. And why not.  All in all, Bob contributed in excess of 200 poems to the Aberdeen Voice and had a few of his pieces published in the glossy Leopard. There maybe should have been a book but he never made it into that sort of print. Occasionally I think of the man. For some strange reason, his memory popped up today despite the few more weeks till the anniversary of his passing. Here, for what it's worth, is his take on the Doric: A’ve ayewis spak the Dori...

With thanks to Rachel Campbell - Aberdeen Performing Arts A brand-new production of Morna Young’s epic fishing drama Lost at Sea will come to His Majesty’s Theatre this coming May.    Inspired by the loss of her fisherman father, Morna Young’s personal tribute to the fishing communities of Scotland comes to His Majesty’s Theatre, Aberdeen (Thursday 9 until Saturday 11 May), as part of a Scotland wide tour. A storm is brewing in a small fishing village. A young woman returns home, searching for answers about her father's death. But as she begins to weave together the strands of her past, a mysterious force unravels family secrets. Lost at Sea journeys through a labyrinth of myth and memory in an epic tale spanning forty years of the fishing industry. Featuring the voices of fishermen and their families in their own words – with music, songs and Scots language – Lost at Sea is the lyrical and powerfully evocative story of a North-East fishing family. With m...

Fatal aircraft crashes, often due to accidents in training, were fairly common in wartime.  Places such as Ballater, Aboyne and Logie Coldstone bear witness to the carnage.  In the October of 1943 for example, a Bristol Blenheim of 526 Fighter Squadron based at Inverness crashed on high ground at Morven. Both aircrew died. The pilot, a Welshman, was recorded as Flight Sergeant Douglas Evans and his wireless operator/air-gunner was named as Flight Sergeant Charles Baden from Derby. Another crash, this time of a Wellington bomber on a training mission out of Lossiemouth, occurred in 1942 high up in the hills behind Braemar. A gamekeeper out checking the deer herd at Glen Cluny eventually spotted the tail of the downed aeroplane sticking out of deep snow and alerted the local policeman. The eight aircrew had lain undiscovered for weeks and consisted mainly of New Zealander, Australian and American servicemen in training. Eventually, some 45 years after the tragedy, one o...

Todays news that officers from Fraserburgh Coastguard Rescue Team were called out to investigate reports of a sinking ship off Cairnbulg comes as no great surprise. Called into action by the HM Coastguard Operations Centre in Aberdeen following a report by a concerned walker the investigators quickly realised that the wreck was none other than the fishing vessel Sovereign, which had foundered off Cairnbulg in 2005. This is not the first time that the rusting wreck has made headlines. July 2014 saw the crew of the Fraserburgh lifeboat summoned to rescue the crew of the Sovereign only to discover that it had foundered some nine years before A member of the lifeboat crew told reporters that a tourist had been standing on Tiger Hill when she spotted the ship lying on its side on a reef. Scottish Television News reported that "She must have thought that it had just freshly sunk and made the call to the RNLI. It is a familiar landmark to locals but you can see how easy i...