Interesting Scottish places: Fettes College

By Elizabeth McQuillan
I cannot walk past Fettes College in Edinburgh and not marvel at how much fun it would be to be a student there, especially if you had a room in one of the towers. Ornate spirals and turrets thrust themselves skywards, and the whole gothic structure suggests Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and [...]

Video: the first Edinburgh Open-Water Swim Festival

Sunday saw the first Edinburgh Open-Water Swim Festival held on Portobello Beach. Competitors came from far and wide to take part – there was even one couple from South Africa. Open-water swimming has become increasingly popular in Scotland, especially in relatively calm waters like these on the Firth of Forth. The organisers now hope to [...]

The longest season kicks off for Scottish rugby

he longest season in Scottish professional rugby kicks off on Friday when Glasgow Warriors host Leinster at Firhill and continues on Saturday with Edinburgh travelling to Cardiff.
Players involved in both those games will find themselves playing, in many cases without a suitable break, through more matches in the Magners League than ever before, five games [...]

Opinion: the Fringe will last despite the sabre rattling

strong>By Ewan Spence
The Edinburgh Fringe is over for another year, and if you look around there’s the usual good news stories (more tickets sold, lots of shows with award nominations),
as well as the more worrying noises (people won’t keep paying these prices, it’s all the fault of “insert another venue’s name in here”).
So why am [...]

Forsyth reveals how Fox ended up as the Jackal

Michael Caine wanted it. Roger Moore wanted it. Charlton Heston even flew himself over from Holyrood to London in pursuit of it.
In the end, none of them got it. Instead, it went to little known actor Edward Fox.
The role was, of course, that of the Jackal in the 1973 film of Frederick Forsyth’s book The [...]

The Edinburgh script beyond milling bourgeoisie and shilling performers

“You know, we really have to blame the politicians for all this”, said the ancient, modulated voice from the front row. “Clinton wanted us to give mortgages to the blacks, and we did so. Bush wanted us to give mortgages to the Hispanics, and we did that too. Yes, I’m a banker. But why [...]

BBC DG calls for broadcasters to work together – and takes swipe at Sky

Delivering the MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh Television Festival, the BBC’s director general, Mark Thompson, said that all the best speeches had anger, “rage if you can mange it” but more importantly a “proper black-hearted villain”.
Most of the audience would have been forgiven for thinking the villain of Thompson’s speech would be James Murdoch, whose [...]

Edinburgh win bodes well for Magners League

The Blairs are back and this time there’s three of them.
Out-of-favour Scotland scrum half Mike Blair played a sizeable contribution to Edinburgh’s impressive 19-17 victory over London Irish at Murrayfield last night.
But his two brothers, David and Alex, also played important roles in this last friendly before the start of the Magners League season – [...]

Five things to avoid in Edinburgh

strong>By Stuart Crawford
Pipers
Anyone with a love of the bagpipes must shudder when in Edinburgh. I have heard the pipes played all over the world, from the Pakistan-Afghan border (courtesy of the Chitral Scouts) to the Green Zone on Cyprus, but nowhere have I heard them played so execrably as in Princes Street. [...]

The Scottish Parliament’s first days: A personal memoir. Part VI

strong>Carry on up the Mile
On 1 July 1999, Her Majesty, a Queen, was privileged to join me in what turned out to be a rather splendid occasion: the official opening of the Scottish Parliament. It was made splendid by the lashings of left-wing sentiment that topped off the dignified proceedings: a meeting of old and [...]

Edinburgh’s new kit unveiled

Edinburgh lock Scott MacLeod discusses prospects for the new season
Edinburgh will play in black or platinum this season, rather than last year’s black or red.
Lock Scott MacLeod and centre Alex Grove sported the new Edinburgh black home and white away strips for the new season at Murrayfield today.
The shirts have been made by Macron, Edinburgh’s [...]

Interesting Scottish places: Mary King’s Close

strong>By Elizabeth McQuillan
Medieval wynds thread, capillary-like, through Edinburgh Old Town. Acting as runs between the larger main streets, the narrow passages skirt between the tall walls of the closes, passing down steps and through archways and courtyards. It is hard to get a sense of what things might have been like living in the [...]

Work finally begins on EICC extension

t’s been a long time coming. The planning process seems to have gone on for ever. But this morning, work finally began on the extension of the Edinburgh International Conference Centre. It will cost £85 million and take 30 months to complete. But it will provide the city with one of its most flexible venues. [...]

Murder most Scottish

Behind the veneer of any – so-called – civilised nation, there are always dark skeletons hidden deep within cupboards…or sometimes not hidden at all, but left out for all to see. So it is with some of Scotland’s most murderously horrible inhabitants: men and women who are remembered for the grisly deeds they committed and [...]

Edinburgh’s bid to host The Clipper Race

by David Calder
It’s one of the toughest races in the sailing world. The Clipper Race takes place every second year and involves ten months sailing round the world – 35,000 miles of ocean racing on board a fleet of ten stripped down 68-foot yachts.
It started from the Humber in September 2009, watched by 150,000 people, [...]

Edinburgh Arts Festival preview

Maybe it’s Glasgow’s currently secure ranking as Scotland’s visual art capital; maybe it’s the guaranteed presence of a massive and unusually open-minded arts audience for the duration, but there’s a winning dearth of angsty pretension or arcane exclusivity about this year’s seventh Edinburgh Art Festival programme.
It is characterised instead by a welcoming expansiveness and palpable [...]

Scottish entrepreneurs pitch in nationwide competition

The Pitch 2010 is a nationwide business competition. Today, the Scottish heat took place at the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh. They were pitching for the chance to go to the London Finals in November and a £50,000 prize. David Calder went along to find out more from one of the organisaters, Dan Martin [...]

Annie Lennox to return to Holyrood

by John Knox
he Scots pop star Annie Lennox is to return to the Scottish Parliament again this summer to head up its Festival of Politics.
She’ll be speaking about her campaign against HIV/AIDS in southern Africa and give a lecture to educationalists on the importance of young people in what she calls “the transformation of [...]

Carving out a digital future for historic sites

hey are known as “The Scottish Ten” although only six have been confirmed as yet. They are the subject of a project launched exactly a year ago with the aim of using cutting edge technology to create exceptionally accurate digital models of Scotland’s five UNESCO designated World Heritage Sites plus a further five high-profile international [...]

New chapter begins for book festival

Without wishing to be churlishly pedantic, it’s hardly an auspicious start. “The Edinburgh International Book Festival unveiled its 2010 programme this morning with a plethora of prize winning authors,” declares the accompanying press release – the Oxford Concise Dictionary definition of “plethora” being “an excess of”, rather than a synonym of “lots”, or “an abundance”, [...]

Business centres find silver lining in recession and Icelandic clouds

he recession has proved an unexpected bonus for at least one sector of the economy. Business at Scotland’s business centres has been booming – and it started almost as soon as the rest of the economy began to falter. Even now when commercial property is bouncing back, business centres are predicting healthy growth.
In the [...]

How syphilis came to Scotland – and where its victims were banished

By Elizabeth McQuillan
It is said that the crew of sailors with Columbus in 1493 had it and the Spanish fleet under Alfonso II brought a great dose of it to Naples in 1494 where the French were consumed by it while fighting there. The French apparently gave it to the rest of Europe, while [...]

Ryanair increase flights from Edinburgh

Ryanair has announced this morning that it’s expanding its operations out of Edinburgh Airport. It’s increasing the number of flights to key destinations, three of them in Spain.
From November, it will have three weekly flights to Alicante and four each to Barcelona, Brussels, Frankfurt and Malaga.
According to Laszlo Tamas, the airline’s Sales & Marketing [...]

Even a hoax scam highlights need to take care with credit cards

The warning looked real. The post in one of Edinburgh’s online forums was well-written. It used the first person, which implied that the writer had first-hand experience of what they were talking about. It described a new scam apparently affecting Visa and Mastercards, with a very detailed account of the process.
It involves cardholders being called [...]

Preview: Short, sharp shocks to lure audiences other operas cannot reach

For the non-buffs among us, a night at the opera can seem like an edifice to be scaled: up to five hours’ duration (in Wagner’s case), with the double challenge of deciphering the story – usually in translation, via supertitles – and appreciating the music. Scottish Opera’s Five:15 series, of which the third year’s programme [...]

Scots Tories told to pack their bags

The Scottish Conservatives have been hit with a double blow – a party grandee calling for them to be scrapped, and a spokesman confirming that they will soon have to move into smaller, less luxurious premises.
The Scottish Conservatives endured a dismal general election last week when they won only seat. But there was worse to [...]

Edinburgh out but Glasgow can make it to the final

Glasgow play the Ospreys on Friday night in the first semi-final the Magners League has ever staged. This will be, without doubt, the biggest game in Glasgow’s professional history.
Indeed, it is difficult to over-estimate how important Friday night’s match is for Scottish rugby. The two pro teams have struggled to ignite public interest and the [...]

Comment: Spare a thought for those consigned to the backwoods

By John Knox
Spare a thought for the losers, cast out into the wilderness of political oblivion by our cruel mistress Democracy. I came home from two constituency counts on Friday morning with the fallen faces of the losers burnt into my memory like masks in a Greek tragedy. And in the afternoon I went off [...]

Six Scottish rail journeys to rival the ‘Harry Potter express’

It’s rare for anything Scottish to win an international award two years in a row, but the West Highland Line (WHL) from Glasgow to Mallaig has done just that. Last week it picked up the Top Rail Journey prize in the Wanderlust travel awards, just as it had done in 2009.
First time round, the WHL [...]

Study of Scots police files reveals 77 unsolved murders

By Allan Laing
A total of 77 murder cases remain unsolved by police in Scotland, ranging from the three female victims of the serial killer Bible John in Glasgow in the 1960s to the mysterious shooting of Nairn banker Alistair Wilson on his doorstep in 2004.
But the list includes murders which go back a lot further [...]

Analysis: Building societies up against the wall

Britain’s building societies are, if not in dire straits, then at least in a parlous state. Here in Scotland, the Dunfermline collapsed and had to be taken over by Nationwide. Famous names like Abbey, Bradford & Bingley and (next month) Alliance & Leicester have been absorbed into Santander. In other parts of [...]

How a friendly chit-chat has replaced the hard sell

Human beings have been “networking” since rival tribes sat down around the camp fire in African savannah. So why is it that some people seem able to make quite a successful living teaching us how to network?
The answer may well lie in a book about networking called … and Death Came Third!. The [...]

Normal flights resumed: Peter Pan as Barrie intended

When playwright David Greig describes the essence of his latest adaptation as “a very primal, very dark, almost Greek-type myth”, it sounds like a natural successor to his previous reworkings of tragic classics like Oedipus, Macbeth and The Bacchae. In fact, he’s talking about none other than that universally cherished modern fairytale, Peter Pan, of [...]

Yet more volcanic ash dashes travels hopes

By Allan Laing
It was a sight for sore eyes. At 8.05 this morning the sound – and the faint vapour trail – of a solitary airplane was spotted in the clear blue skies above Glasgow.
People who, under normal circumstances, would barely notice its presence gazed upwards to catch a rare glimpse of a commercial aircraft [...]

Video: Arup breaks through the sound barriers

How do you know how announcements will sound in a new railway station or airport? What will the music sound like in a new concert hall? Arup has been showing off its latest audio technology to the public in a large box erected in St Andrew Square for the Edinburgh Science Festival.

Salt-sweet blend of antic satire in John Byrne’s Cherry Orchard

The Cherry Orchard/John Byrne @ Royal Lyceum
ou wait ages for a new translation of The Cherry Orchard, Anton Chekhov’s final masterpiece, and then three come along at once: well, within the last year or so, anyway.
First up was Tom Stoppard’s version, for Kevin Spacey and Sam Mendes’s Bridge Project company, which premiered in New [...]

Home-grown talent brings backdrops to the fore in Rufus’s gigs

Talent attracts talent. So when Loudon Wainwright and the late Kate McGarrigle produced a son, he was hardly going to be singing back-up vocals for Air Supply. Sister Martha is hardly a slouch in the singing-songwriting stakes.
Whatever your yardstick, Rufus Wainwright is one of the most fascinating artists of the 21st century. He has written [...]

New green construction standards not the answer, say housebuilders

From October, new homes in Scotland will have to be more energy efficient, have greater sound insulation and better levels of security. The thinking behind the new building standards announced this week is to cut emissions, create jobs in small-scale renewables and save money. So why does the housebuilders’ trade association cry foul?
The [...]

Art and science in harmony at Edinburgh’s spring-time festival

It might appear contrary, even churlish, to focus on the arts’ role in the Edinburgh International Science Festival – they’re hardly neglected elsewhere in the city’s calendar, after all – but in fact such interdisciplinary overlap features prominently in the event’s two-week programme, which kicks off this Easter weekend.
Theatre, music, film, comedy, poetry and visual [...]

Preview: Dance Theatre pushes back the boundaries of ‘what’s normal’

For non-aficionados, contemporary dance tends to conjure images of physical perfection, rarefied intensity and wordless abstraction – all of which conceptions are challenged or subverted by the two new works featured on Scottish Dance Theatre’s spring tour.
Two of the nine dancers in NQR, for instance, are wheelchair users – the title being an old medical [...]

Gold injections to help doctors tackle disease

Tiny probes made of gold-coated particles and injected into patients could provide vital information to diagnose and track disease.
Researchers at Edinburgh University believe that the chemical sensors, used in conjunction with laser lights, could allow diseases to be detected and monitored remotely.
The chemical sensor particles are coated with gold because it is an unreactive metal, [...]

Opinion: Scotland rules the waves – or are we just all at sea?

By John Knox
For 150 years we have turned our back on the sea. Now, at last, we are rediscovering the charms of being a maritime nation. “Scotland rules the waves,” as Admiral Alex Salmond put it. I only hope it doesn’t turn out to be a Captain Pugwash story of plundering piracy.
For generations we have [...]

Picture gallery: Edinburgh’s arts landmark ushers in a new era

By Brendan O’Brien
The Usher Hall has been a feature of Edinburgh’s cultural landscape for nearly a hundred years. The Hall provides a stage for the Edinburgh Jazz & Blues Festival during the world famous Edinburgh Festivals and as a venue for classical music. In 1998 Edinburgh City Council announced £9 million to renovate the building after [...]

The folk festival that isn’t

According to the official publicity, this weekend marks the start of  “Edinburgh’s annual traditional arts festival”, Ceilidh Culture. At first glance, the three-week line-up looks reasonably impressive, with a colour brochure listing some 90 events in total, including gigs by such leading contemporary folk names as Paul Brady, Kate Rusby, Fiddlers’ Bid and Laura Marling, [...]

Nifty nomination for acid croft pioneers

Congratulations to the Edinburgh-based band Shooglenifty, veteran pioneers of the folk/dance music fusion self-styled as “acid croft”, and the sole Scottish act nominated in this year’s Songlines Music Awards (formerly the Radio 3 World Music Awards), writes Sue Wilson.
Based on the votes of both Songlines readers and the general public, they’ve been shortlisted for the [...]

The noble heritage of a good walk ruined

ark Twain may have said that: “Golf is a good walk spoiled” but there are millions around the world who say otherwise.
While there is some dispute as to who can actually claim to have been the first person ever to have hit something with a stick, what Scotland can prove is that the earliest mention [...]

The woman who orders doctors to wash their hands

In the fourth of a series of interviews with people who have an impact on health and health services in Scotland, The Caledonian Mercury talks infection control and getting doctors to wash their hands with domestic supervisor Val Hay.
Every night when Val Hay gets home from work, she vacuums. It’s necessary, she believes, because [...]

From drug addict to up and coming filmmaker

Warning: film contains strong language and disturbing scenes

Tolerance from Garry fraser on Vimeo.
Just seven short years ago, Garry Fraser was a mess. Addicted to heroin and crack cocaine, he had watched many of his friends die and had himself served a jail sentence for drug dealing.
Now, aged 31, the lad from the north Edinburgh [...]

LEDs trip the light fantasic

Pedestrians walking along Princes Street tonight probably won’t realise they’re witnessing the latest example in a technological revolution that’s gradually becoming visible in every area of our lives. It might even help to save the world, or at least destroy it more slowly.
After 18 months of consultation four street lights next to the Balmoral Hotel [...]

The previous incarnations of the Caledonian Mercury

This newspaper is the latest in a line of “Mercuries” that began on 31 December, 1660, with the launch of Mercurius Caledonius – arguably Scotland’s first newspaper.
Written and edited by Thomas Sydserf, the son of the Bishop of Galloway, it was royalist in tone, but irreverent always. Sydserf was a playwright known as the “comedian” [...]

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