Duncan Harley

The media today reported on the export ban placed on the original annotated High-Court copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Seemingly, if anyone in the land has a deep-enough wallet, then the actual copy used on the bench during the landmark 1960 obscenity trial can be had for a measly £56,250 or thereabouts. For those not in the know, the novel was penned just prior to D.H. Lawrence’s death in 1930 – well I suppose that would be a given really. Eventually published by Penguin some 30 years later the lusty tome became an underground sensation as both inquisitive schoolboys and curious adults swapped secret dog-eared copies in the hope of finding out what the lady did with the gamekeeper in the bushes behind the big house. A Crown Prosecution followed under the Obscene Publications Act and sales rocketed when the case was decided by a jury who took just a few hours to decide that the content did not deprave or corrupt anyone in the land. A permissive 1960’s society had seemingly t...

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...

Seemingly anyone who has shown they have an IQ in the top 2% can submit evidence of this to join Mensa. I have never joined Mensa. Not that I can’t afford the application fee – some £26.87 plus VAT or other – it’s just that I can’t make head nor tale of the admission process. “Does your child prefer Charles Dickens to Cbeebies, or do they find school boring and unchallenging? You could have a bright spark on your hands!” “There are many confusing notions about what giftedness is and is not. Indeed, in several respects, the life experience of the gifted individual seems paradoxical.” “Mensa hosts a limited number of group supervised tests at centres around the British Isles. This package provides you with a rounded assessment of your capabilities, for a one-off fee of just £24.95. We also offer schools the chance to test their pupils aged over 10 and a half.” Oh really? Seemingly ‘Mensa is the largest and oldest high IQ society in the world. It is ap...

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 ordered a few more copies of my recent book today. I need a few to sell on to an admiring public. My financial adviser wants one and the whisky shop at Inverurie are almost sold out of signed copies. Of course, the new book is also nearing completion and a third draft – or is it a fourth, is well underway. All that remains is to sort out those last three chapters. Typhoid, oil and Trump as I recall. Plus, a wee bit about Piper Alpha. It’s all in the best possible taste and in the big scheme of things all should be well. The ordering process however was a bit weird. Now, I know for a fact that Amazon have around 30 copies left in stock prior to the next reprint and if you try to order from the site they might even go as far as to offer free delivery for orders over a tenner. Imagine my surprise then when my distributors advised that they had some books in stock, but they could not fulfil my entire order right now. “Hi, can I order 25 books please?” “Of course, do ...

On the day that Aberdeen International Airport saw a Trump plane land on the tarmac to disgorge some retinue along with a rumoured son called Eric, I finally realised that Air Force One is too large to land anywhere in Scotland. In fact, try as he might, the half-German half-Scottish golf-magnate will thankfully be prevented by his presidential status from stopping off unannounced at Aberdeen for a round of golf. The big bosses at Aberdeen Airport must have foreseen this. Calls for runway expansion at Heathrow have made headlines over the past decade and the, perhaps outdated notion of a UK air-hub, has in consequence made the southern counties once more vulnerable to conquest from overseas. Not so in the Shire however where anything bigger than an Airbus needs flaps down, brakes full-on and reverse thrust to avoid running out of tarmac and smacking right into Dyce caravan site. Of course, Gatwick should have been the landing-field of choice for the presidential minde...