Duncan Harley

Been a windy day. Some Storm Frank or other passed overhead and blew horizontal rain all over the shire. The man in the paper-shop commented that it had all started out so well but that after he arrived at work at 6am, all hell had taken over. I assumed he was discussing the weather and made an attempt at a nod. “Yes, I hate the wind but love the rain” I told him. Not impressed he asked if I needed a receipt, to which I said “no”. The new book, of course, pounds on and I just need to add some seven thousand more words plus a good few wee edits. A chapter entitled Bravehearts  now includes the story of shop-window mannequin Helena Torry. Interviewed on the Andrew Neil Daily Politics show some years ago Helena’s political agent Renee Slater revealed that she - Renee, not the dummy - had in fact spent time in custody after being charged with electoral fraud. “I was in a police cell for around 6 hours and they wouldn’t let me out until I handed in Helena. It was a sort of priso...

Seemingly the march of the robots is upon us. Not only can the digital servants cut the lawn and provide endless fun for the family pet as it – the robot and not the dog – bruises around the living-room sucking up dust, but the NHS is seemingly considering employing artificial intelligence to carry out everyday tasks around the average ward. Called Carebots, the plastic nurses will no doubt race around the wards emptying bedpans and deliverooing pizza’s thus freeing up valuable clinical resources. According to Former health minister Lord Darzi, a leading surgeon, nearly a third of care staff tasks could be handed over to robots in a bid to save £13bn a year. Indeed, the Telegraph goes so far as to suggest that he is calling for ‘Full automation’ of health and social services. All well and good then from the man whom the London Journal of Primary Care says is ‘ a great believer in bottom-up’ . Indeed, one can almost smell the robotic nurse advising the patient in bed four t...

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...

As subliminal messages go the Halo Effect is a sublimely subtle psychological concept. In essence a marketing concept and a route to unimaginable riches, the Halo Effect seemingly encourages us unsuspecting and blatantly thick consumers to assume that two and two make five. Apparently, the food-retailers have this down to a fine art. Or, at least their PR firms do. Joanna Blythman’s splendid article in today’s Guardian explains the phenomenon quite clearly when she writes that “When it comes to labelling, food retailers run rings around their customers, and mainly get away with it. They weave a lexicon of feelgood terms – ‘fresh’, ‘handmade’, ‘artisan’, ‘local’, ‘farmhouse’, ‘healthy’, ‘natural’ – into their marketing messages.” The halo effect in marketing allows a brand to positively anchor its reputation to a popular item. So, if you want to sell sausages you might just want to avoid descriptives which suggest dead stuff. A negative brand image is a big no no and ...

It’s been an interesting day. After visiting a grave at Old Deer, we found ourselves with a very flat tyre. Normally this is not a problem of course, you simply jack up the car and get on with the business of sorting it all out. However, on this occasion, following the jacking up and the mandatory loosening of several wheel-studs, the car fell off the jack and grounded. I swear it was not my fault. Yes, I leant on the bloody thing and yes, I gasped in anticipation of imminent re-hospitalisation as it rolled backward towards me. But, in the big scheme of things, it was nothing to do with me really. If the driver, not me I can assure you, had applied the hand-brake none of this would have ever happened. Fortunately, I survived the encounter unscathed aside from a sense of survivor’s guilt. Should I have done something to prevent the catastrophe? Should I have taken the blame? Nah. And double nah. What to do? Thoughts of asking Green-flag to the rescue were quickly put aside and an oct...

Readers of my new book are maybe wondering why a good few of the images are credited to foreign museum sources. The Tryggve Gran chapter is a case in point. There are various archives which hold local images of his aeroplane at Cruden Bay. Sadly, however only the Norsk Tecknisk Museum in Oslo was kind enough to allow me a fee free image for inclusion in the book. Scottish sources wanted what they imagined was a suitable cut from my author’s royalties. In a similar vein, Museums Victoria in Melbourne were more than happy to source and then send me images of a James VIII silver guinea for inclusion on the basis that a photo-credit would be nice. I can respect that. I have of course met this sort of kindness before and it is of course very much appreciated. Balmoral Estates went to a lot of trouble to find me an image of Balmoral Castle and Fraserburgh Heritage Centre bunged me an image of Buffalo Bill Cody atop his white charger on the wild West Pier at Fraserburgh. All good and all...

Much of the fun in the penning of a book is in the reading of the final published text. Newspaper articles and magazine features pale into insignificance when your tome makes those dusty and hallowed bookshelves for the very first time. Not that it beats child-birth and not that I have experienced that first hand, although I have a couple of sons and can vividly recall the exhilaration of getting to know them both for the first time. So, yes, a book is different and not quite on the same scale at all. But, and I say this with all sincerity, it is still a big rush to cast an eye over the published product and hold that thought ‘I made this happen.’ Here is the introduction to The A-Z of Curious Aberdeenshire in its entirety. On the re-reading, I might have wished for a couple of changes. But hey, in the big scheme of things, it’s not at all a bad piece of writing: ‘The folklore and the history of Aberdeenshire make for interesting reading. Invading armies have come and gone and ...

It’s been quite a heady week review-wise. On top of the – now four – feedback reviews of the new book on the Amazon platform several local and not so local newspapers have been brave enough to expose my curious writings to a wider audience. First of all, The Scotsman published a wide-ranging piece titled ‘7 gems from Aberdeenshire’s past’. Penned by Alison Campsie, whom I have never knowingly met – honest Injun’s – the article begins with the history of Aberdeenshire Alligators and concludes with a tale about Aberdeenshire toilets - I kid you not. And the full feature can be found on the Scotsman website at: https://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/7-gems-from-aberdeenshire-s-curious-past-1- On the previous Friday a good friend had contacted me to say that I had finally made it into the Evening Express. Now, to put this in context, I have been trying to get the local Aberdeenshire papers to take my articles and theatre reviews for ages but without much success. On this occasion however,...

I am often amazed at human kindness. One of the scariest moments I have recently experienced was when I had to press a small green button in front of a bank-teller on Mid-Street in Keith. Keith, I hear you say. For the uninitiated, it’s a town in Moray just over the border from Aberdeenshire. Known as the friendly town – and I can vouch for that accolade – the inhabitants are in the habit of saying hello at every opportunity. Even if they don’t know you from Adam, an upbeat ‘hello and how are you today?’ followed by a reassuring pause to discus the weather usually interrupts any High Street jaunt. A selection of traditional shops, including a butcher who, alongside selling the traditional range of animal body-parts also sells local-history books completes the picture. But I digress. That scary moment involved the purchasing of a house and the button in question would, given the press of a single digit, send untold thousands of hard-earned pounds into the ether of the banking in...