Duncan Harley

Alongside the usual kettles, teabags, coffee filters and coffee makers my George Square kitchen is littered with pictures. On the upper left resides an image from Lake Garda alongside a redundant flat-screen TV which hides a hole in the wall made by a previous incumbent of the property. We are talking lath and plaster here, not plaster-board, and the fragile lath option is less than forgiving. On the far bottom right is an illustration an artist- son Ben penned for some long-forgotten illustrator who had, at one time worked as a cover- artist for a latter-day Pink-Floyd. Above the redundant flat-screen, is an illustration for a 2017 Leopard article. Oldmeldrum was the theme as I recall and for some unknown reason the line-drawn graphic, in all its magnificence, failed to make it into print. But, it did make my kitchen wall. As for Bob, well, he was a fictional character in a short story competition. I don’t often enter such things, after all most entrants are pretty much bo...

As one of the Chernobyl generation I am always on the look out for signs of nuclear illness. The radioactive cloud from the disaster sped slowly over all of Europe spreading an invisible ash over the entire continent. As with Windscale before it, Chernobyl was officially downplayed. The very public pouring of milk down Northumbrian drains following the Windscale nuclear disaster kind of gave the game away and Windscale was quickly renamed Sellafield as a cover-up for those guilty parties. Shameful indeed. Officially the only folk to suffer were the oysters of the Irish Sea who were found to contain a mixture of radioactive Cerium, Ruthenium and Caesium. In the case of Chernobyl, although the region around the stricken town was evacuated and the place remains contaminated till this very day, us Scots were told not to worry but simply advised not to eat sheep sourced from those high pastures around the English borders. Seemingly the politicians, the scientists and the engineers o...