Duncan Harley

Boris got tough virus-wise on March 23, thirty days ago according to the Sun and same thirty days ago according to the Guardian. So that’s alright then. Thirty days to get used to lockdown and thirty days to find stuff to occupy the long days. No problem, I’ll write another book I thought. At maybe 2k words each day it should take at most forty days plus maybe another 10 days of formatting. Then add maybe ten editing days and ten more for subbing and more subbing. Trick with subbing of course is to spot grammar as well as spelling mistakes. Trick two – read it all backwards out loud from back to front. That’ll sort out the men from the buoys! Plus of course punctuation. Ok, make that eighty or so days. Or maybe 90 when you include proofing for accuracy, dates, timelines – we are talking non-fiction local history here! And, of course, the placing of images, creation of a cover plus some back-page. I could go on. Oh, and I need a willing graphic artist for that cover. The cover s...

According to last Sundays Observer Magazine the very-third-time-ever that the word fuck was broadcast live on the UK airwaves was on 1 December 1976. How do they know this? Well, seemingly the Sex Pistols appeared on the Bill Grundy Show and uttered the immortal words “Bill Grundy is a fuckin’ rotter”. That’s probably on record somewhere in the depths of the BBC archives but what about the first two utterances, of which writer Juliana Piskorz makes no mention whatsoever. I may have an answer . The art of swearing upon the airwaves goes back a fair wee bit beyond those heady seventies. Broadcaster Richard Dimbleby was a close friend and colleague of Robin Duff, the 32nd and last laird of Oldmeldrum. Aberdeenshire-born Duff inherited both his lairdship and Meldrum House, the family ancestral home, from his uncle in 1954. A Cambridge graduate, he worked as a presenter then as a radio journalist for the BBC. During World War 2 Robin famously stood on London rooftops during the Blitz de...