Duncan Harley

What a state the place is in. As an election looms, yet another presidential visit is on the cards and the media is replete with tales of blue-blooded transgressions. You have to hand it to the Royals. When they are up, they are up, and when they are down, they are down. And when they are only halfway up, they are neither up nor down. Somewhat famously, Meghan is at odds with Associated Newspapers over claims that her tiny rural cottage @ Frogmore suffered renovations funded by the tax-payer to the tune of one cheap as chips copper bath plus the small matter of £500k worth of sound-insulation targeted at those nasty proles over at Heathrow. You can’t put a value on a good night’s sleep after all. Meanwhile Andrew is suffering memory loss over allegations of unsubstantiated impropriety with a seventeen-year-old Floridian in some lost year or other. He obviously needs to check with his press-secretary regarding his movements during the year in question. Surely it can’t be that ...

The blogosphere, and indeed the mainstream media, are all over the royal wedding this weekend and why on earth not. I mean, this is the media event of the decade and, if the pundits are to be taken seriously, then around 86% of the British public are lauding it for the royals. The other 14% are no doubt secretly sneaking a wee look at the endless re-runs and I know I was one of them. That is, until Janice made an appearance at which point we watched until the very end taking only a few well spent hours out to attend the BA Vintage Country Fair over at Dunecht. Then it was back for chips and a few feet up on the settee for more of the royal highlights. That’s the beauty of this digital age really. You can miss the footie or indeed the wedding of the year then do a seamless catch-up later in the day. We saw that royal kiss, or was it a pair of kisses, endless times and spotted Charles leading his future daughter-in-law down the aisle on at least a hundred news clips. Then there w...

Richard Morrison writes in today’s Times in Scotland about how the about to be wed royal couple can learn a thing or two from long dead poet Philip Larkin. Seemingly the Windsor wedding day falls on Whit Saturday and the theory, at least, suggests that the wearing of white is appropriate for the Pentecostal weekend. Larkin’s take on the state of marriage is, he writes, ‘really, a meditation on marriage and what lies ahead for the travelling couples’. As the wedding train finally arrives at its destination Larkin, always the pessimist perhaps, writes gloomily about ‘a sense of falling, like an arrow shower, sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.’ As for Whit Saturday. Well, Google directs searchers to White Saturday which is seemingly the day after Black Friday which is the day when stores hike up prices to a level to which only the rich can aspire. Google aside, Richard suggests that the church festival of Whit Saturday was in fact well known in those heady pre-Google days ...

It’s been an interesting day. Up at seven, AM that is, in Garthdee to take breakfast – a boiled egg, some buttered toast and some very black coffee - then off to Inverurie to pen last night’s theatre review. HMT, for their sins, hosted Hosseini’s The Kite Runner last night – it plays until Saturday next and is a splendid performance by some splendid actors in a splendid setting. The review, for Aberdeen Voice, begins: “The brutal rape of young Hassan by sociopath Assef and his cohorts sets the tone of this touring stage adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s best-selling novel. And the child-rape not the only gut-wrenching scene from the book to be splashed all over the stage in front of the theatre audience. An execution by the Taliban, a bone-crunching beating or two and tales of death by landmine are intermingled with implicit references to paedophile driven child abduction and the stoning of adulterers … “ The local daily was much more subdued, referring only to some ‘sever...