Duncan Harley

  Fraserburgh born punk rocker Steve Fairnie (1951-1993) is perhaps best remembered locally as the frontman of the post-punk band Writz. But of course, his main claim to fame was his partnership with singer songwriter Bev Sage. Together they took the 1980s charts by storm with a remake of Frederick Hollander’s 1930s hit ‘Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuß auf Liebe eingestellt’ – better known perhaps as ‘Falling in Love Again (Can't Help It)’. Both Billie Holiday and the Beatles recorded cover versions of the song, but somehow the Sage/Fairnie Techno Twins version stands out. Of course, fame does not come ‘cheep’ and in what was most probably a PR stunt, he made the front pages when he mesmerised a chicken in a Cornwall café in front of a gaggle of journalists. It was summer 1983 and obviously a short news day. He and Bev had been out dining in a local café when inexplicably in walked a feathered hen. The rest is history. The lad from Fraserburgh was about to release a new single titled ...

It was only by luck that I managed to drive off the screaming savages. Outnumbered some eighteen to one I was at first fearful for my very life. However, my fearsome appearance, plus the fact that I brandished a loaded rifle, proved sufficient to ward them off and I had only to scream back at them in my native tongue to startle even the boldest of them. ‘Awa ye go ye nasty wee radgies! Awa wi ye before I take this wee sharp blade and cut ye a Glesga smile and maybe perchance a new bum! Am no kiddin an at’s a fact ya filthy bunch o’ heathens!! Plus, a've got a big gun and you've no got one between the whole lot of you!' At this, the largest of the savages - a sheer giant of a man,  raised his club as if to counter my threatening tone. So, I instantly shot him through the throat and followed up with several facial thrusts of my dagger. He grinned widely and dropped down dead at my feet with blood spewing furiously from his wounds. It was a classic case of gaining domin...

Agricultural prosperity in Aberdeenshire owes much to the improvements in communication and transport brought about both by the Aberdeenshire Canal in the early 19th Century and the arrival of the railways in around 1850. For the first time, key agricultural inputs such as guano and the euphemistically named ‘night soil’ or inner city dung collected from population centres could be ploughed into the land. Movement of goods was key. And i n 1793 a survey was commissioned to map a route for a proposed Don and Urie-side Canal. The original thought had been to follow the courses of the rivers Don and Urie to link Insch and Monymusk with Inverurie and Aberdeen Harbour. There was even a suggestion that the water-network might include the settlements of Aboyne and Banchory. However, due to cost implications, a less ambitious route linking Inverurie to Aberdeen roughly along the line of the River Don was adopted. Officially opened in June 1805, the waterway featured 17 canal locks. Ther...

Months ago, at least it seems like it, I was sent a copy of  ‘Hotels of the Stars’ by Tessa Williams. Described in glowing terms as featuring ‘A-list Haunts and Hideaways’ the book, amongst several others sat amongst my pile of promised reviews.  Inevitably some never make it to the top of that pile and kindness occasionally precludes that promised review. In the case of Tessa’s tome, a bit of illness got in the way and now that I am much better, I thought it timely to pen a few words. A journalist by trade, Tessa is no stranger to the content having spent a portion of her life penning for the likes of Marie Claire, Elle and Vogue. There are no Holiday Inn’s or Travelodge’s here and nor should there be. With an introduction by Albert Roux this book reveals the inner workings of that cosseted world of the super-rich and those super-famous-folk who inhabit the likes of London’s Dorchester, Fort William’s Inverlochy Castle and L’Hotel Paris. Raffles, The Chelsea Hote...

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...

Today’s news that Alexa’s Christmas message was a typical ‘Sorry, I’m not working’ or ‘I’m sorry, but I cannot order a hit on your previous foster-parents right now. Please try again later or press the re-set button’ led to a degree of speculation that the household assistant was either having a laugh or a festive day off. Yuletide recipients of the Echo Dot, a lookalike Alexa-clone reporting to the likes no doubt of both Google-analytics and the CIA, were experiencing similar connectivity problems. Seemingly the fresh-out-the-box Dot and the beefier Echo were having difficulty understanding English never mind binary. Turning lights off and on and answering questions about the making of the perfect festive gravy seemingly proved too much for the spy-in-the-home devices which at up to £89 a pop are programmed to report our every move to those shadowy companies who track both our spending habits and our every behaviour. In Christmas past the Mori Polls would send canvassers r...

Writing the back-page fluff for a new book is both a pain and a pleasure. The publishers generally put out a pre-publication questionnaire some months before even a single word is placed on the final page. Well, not that final really since drafts more drafts and final drafts are likely to supersede the early content. So, ideas change and the final fluff might not resemble the initial hopeful words. Then of course there is the difficult issue of the title. Should it be ironic, reflective of some pun or simply be a play on some clever words such as ‘Here be dragons’ or ‘You should read this since it will make you cleverer than you were before’? I don’t really know. But what I do know is that the joy of holding the print in your grubby hand makes up for the hassle of getting into print and the lack of monetary rewards. Not many folks know this, but most books fail to make more than the cost of printing and sell just a few thousand copies or even less. At last week’s Ab...

I t’s been a great week. We got back from Spain – well actually Gran Canaria – on Monday. As always, Booking-dot-com pestered for a review and I duly obliged . “Arucas is slightly off the beaten track and at first sight might not be the first place of choice for tourists seeking sun in Gran Canaria. However, the area has much to offer and the Hotel Emblematico is perhaps the best place to stay in town. A traditional family house, the Emblematico has no airs or graces and offers simple easy-going accommodation within easy reach of both the coast and the mountains. There are traditional restaurants just around corner and if you are minded, there is a chapel just down the road. We used the local Global bus services to get about. Firgas, Las Palmas and Teror can be reached for less than a fiver and a trip south to the more-busy resorts on the southern coast costs less than £14 return. All in all, a bargain. Breakfast is described as ‘continental’, but it is more than that. A choi...

July 2014 saw the crew of the Fraserburgh lifeboat summoned to rescue the crew of the fishing trawler ‘Sovereign’ which had run aground at Cairnbulg 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.  "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 it would be for a visitor to mistake it for a vessel in distress" he continued "It was a mistake made with the best of intentions." The Banff-registered trawler had in fact run aground during a storm in December 2005 with the five fishermen on board being airlifted to safety. The rusting wreck later made international headlines when it made a surprise appearance on a promotional cinema poster for the Hollywood movie Life of Pi. The blockbuster, an adaptation of a Yann Martel novel, featu...

Scotland’s love affair with Indian food knows few bounds. As a Glasgow student many years ago, I variously got to grips with endlessly bland lamb-bhuna styled carry outs and mind-numbingly awful  starters following a good few pints of  lager. Various mediocre meals were served up as authentic Indian sub-continent cuisine and we accepted them as the norm. It seems odd nowadays, but if the consistency varied from one restaurant to another, we moaned. A McDonald’s style mindset prevailed and the security of a cloak of blandness took precedence. Thankfully the days of Indian food by numbers are fast ending and the recently opened Carron To Mumbai at Stonehaven is a stunning example of the new enlightenment in Indian cuisine. I first became aware of the Carron Restaurant a good few years ago. Family visits for birthdays and get-togethers led me there and the place simply blew me away. The food was one thing, but the Art-Deco setting was quite another. Combine ...

Writing competitions are just that … competitions. You either win, or you lose and, in the big scheme of things losing seems likely. After all, there can only be one winner and the rest of the pack are destined to some dark hole in the vast behind of some ugliness best described as the deep pond of despair. I should know. In a fit of participation, I penned a piece for a competition recently. Themed on the note ‘Noon’, the tale centred on a cowboy village in the Garioch – or more correctly near Huntly, the piece failed to even make the long-list and said literary judges have, to date, quite forgotten to get back to say why. Makes a mockery really. But then, I would say that … Here, for what it’s worth, is my High Noon, Hadleyville piece : “Hidden in full view alongside some minor road linking Tranquillity with Huntly, the wild-western village hosts a graveyard appropriately named Boot Hill. There are no genuine graves here, only empty headstones made of wood, but visito...

The snagging list for the next book pounds on. Off for an edit, the new tome – to the best of my knowledge – has but three embarrassing bloopers. Not so last night’s blog about Dracul, which had just the two. Fortunately, both Dacre Stoker and J.D. Barker were forgiving and, following a wee hint, suitable amendments were made to the inaccurate portions of the piece. That’s the essence of the blogging problem really. Bloggers generally have no editor. You write, publish and generally wing it. Unless readers take umbrage, or better still make suggestions, the blogosphere relies on feedback and hopefully kind words. I don’t as yet have a cover image for the new book, but here – in the hope of some pre-publication appreciation – is an extract … “In his circa AD 98 biography of his father-in-law Agricola, Tacitus records amongst other things the victory of the Roman general Agricola’s armies over the Barbarian hordes of Caledonia. Much has been made of the fact that, although...

Not may folk know it, but there is a cowboy-town just outside Huntly. Not that you would likely stumble across it by accident of course. Hidden in full view alongside some minor road linking Tranquillity with Huntly, the wild-western village hosts a graveyard appropriately named Boot Hill. There are no genuine graves here, only empty headstones made of wood, but visitors to Tranquillity kind-of-generally get the drift. Boot Hill is of course full of those folks ‘hung by mistake’ and ‘shot at noon cause he stole a horse’. The carved markers speak of bank-robbers and cattle rustlers who, in some far dreamland took that step too far and suffered the indignity of a good bit of neck-stretching after shooting the Sherriff. Not that Huntly is a stranger to the wild west. In far off days The Bruce ravished the land in what became known as The Hership Of Buchan. Burning and slaying as he went the somewhat nasty man ensured loyalty via the sword. The early American settlers must ...

The timber-built railway station at Ballater was frequented by the Royal Family in the days when the journey north to Balmoral involved rail travel. When the Deeside line closed to passengers in 1966 the building found new use as shop units and even incorporated a Tourist Information Centre and a restaurant. Prior to the disastrous 2015 fire, a part of the building was turned into a museum and visitors could, if they were lucky, meet up with a mannequin dressed as Queen Victoria’s loyal ghillie John Brown on the station platform. A second mannequin representing an ageing Victoria, complete with mourning dress, could be seen taking tea in the private Royal Apartments of the station building. Those Royal Apartments naturally featured a Royal Loo. Thunder-box in form and with an ornately decorated porcelain pan, replete with Acanthus leaves and brightly painted woodland flowers, the loo was off limits to ordinary travellers during Victoria’s time. In more recent times however, s...

I see that as part of this weekends Doors Open Day, Ramsay MacDonald’s family home in Lossiemouth is to open to the public. From humble beginnings he became not only the first ever Labour Prime Minister but also one of the first members of parliament to embrace aviation as a means of transport to and from his Lossiemouth home to the powerhouse of Westminster. In pre-RAF Lossiemouth days he regularly flew out of grass airstrips on the outskirts of the town. Born in 1866 he entered Parliament in 1906 as MP for Leicester following an early career as a journalist. A fierce opponent of the Boer War he was outspoken in his opposition to WW1. His pacifist convictions and unshakeable socialist stance quickly made him a hate figure both locally and nationally. He was blackballed by Moray Golf Club in 1916 and vilified in the likes of John Bull magazine as “A traitor and a coward, a libeller and a slanderer of his country … he is nothing more than the illegitimate son of a Scotch ser...

I had hoped to go zip-wiring down Union Street at the weekend. It’s something of an occasional passion and although I hate the blatant uncontrollability of rib-ticklers and roller-coasters, the prospect of dangling dangerously from a swinging cable whilst travelling at speed over difficult terrain somehow fills me with joy. Aviemore and Perthshire have been my previous zip-wire haunts and a quick enquiry to the city council elicited the underwhelming response that ‘We won’t have the zipwire installed on union street In Town Without My Car Day.’ It was an omen. In the event, The Scottish Samurai Awards over at Maryculter House Hotel took prominence and I reported on this at length @: https://duncanharley.blogspot.com/2018/09/the-scottish-samurai-awards-by-duncan.html As it turned out, the Union Street zip-extravaganza was cancelled on the day due to inclement weather although all was fine over at Maryculter. In a quite separate piece of disappointing street-theatre, it s...

A local history conference hosted by Aberdeen City Library Service at the Beach Ballroom in early 2017 featured a talk by George Adam, the then Lord Provost. An eloquent man and a humorous speaker he spoke about the triumphs and tribulations of the Granite City before moving on to what seemed like a diatribe regarding the cultural and artistic state of the city.  Using a fictional foreign civic dignitary as an anchor point, he advised attendees that the city offered a multitude of cultural attractions. “First of all,” he said “I would take the visitor to the Music Hall. Such a splendid place with such a splendid history. Oh, wait it’s closed for renovation. Then perhaps we could visit the Art Gallery. Oh, wait it’s closed also. Well, maybe Provost Skene’s House. Oh, wait it’s temporarily closed to the Public.” Obviously said attractions will eventually re-open for public gaze, although it beggar’s belief that the funding was never put in place before the various...

During the early years of WW2, spies and saboteurs were put ashore all around the UK coastline, often by flying boat and sometimes from submarines . Usually they were quickly picked up by police suspicious of forged documents and in at least one case due to cycling along on the wrong side of the road. Spies making landfall on the Aberdeenshire coastline had a particularly difficult time of it since, due to the close-knit nature of the coastal communities, any stranger instantly came under special scrutiny. During April 1941, two armed men landed at Crovie pier from a rubber dinghy. Road signs in the North-east had been removed and the Emergency Coastal Defences were in place. General Ironside’s nearby Innes Links Coastal Gun Battery was yet to fire a shot in anger, but the general mood was fear of invasion from German held Norway and deep distrust of German sounding foreigners. It was just before 6 a.m. on April 8th, and three hours earlier the two men had been dropped off a ...

September 3 marks the  anniversary of the declaration of war in  1939 and, just a few hours into the conflict, the Bennachie hill-range in Aberdeenshire was witness to an accident resulting in the deaths of two RAF airmen. The hill has seen two 20 th century air crashes. The most recent in 1952 when an RAF Gloster Meteor jet fighter on a training flight from RAF Leuchars crashed during a snowstorm into Oxen Craig on 12 February 1952. The pilot, Yorkshireman Brian Lightfoot died instantly on impact and wreckage was scattered over a wide area. One of the aircraft’s cannon was retrieved by souvenir hunters and was for a time stashed in a barn over at Oyne before being re-discovered in the 1980’s. The RAF’s fleet of Gloster Meteors had what can only be described as a horrendous safety record and records indicate that there were 436 fatal accidents between 1944 and 1986. Some 890 of these aeroplanes were lost during that period over the entire UK including one piloted by ...