I spend part of most Sundays reloading my MP3 player with a batch of BBC podcasts, to see me, like a sheep’s heid, through the week. A regular item is the ten minute Radio 4 slot ‘A Point of View’. The current contributor is the popular (or should that be ‘populist’?) philosopher Alain de Botton. […]

The first blog by Highland maker Patricia Niemann about Caithness lichens as current inspiration for jewellery.

Panto is a vital ingredient in our cultural mix. For many thousands of people, from one year to the next, it’s their only regular experience of live theatre. For quite a few, no doubt, it’s their only experience of any kind of live show. And of course, for most theatres, it’s a crucial opportunity to […]

Press articles regularly feature complaints about the poor coverage of music on television. You can see the point when the BBC even treats its own Choir of the Year competition so meanly, squeezing a pre-recorded and edited version of the final into a 90 minute slot on BBC 4.

Mentoring to Market visit to Craft Central.

When I was in Glasgow last month for a Creative Scotland meeting, I had an hour spare before it started, and took the chance to have a wander, and survey the present state of the ‘Merchant City’.

An ageing arts bureaucrat surveys the scene and wonders where the new generation will come from

Whenever, as now, there’s the prospect of serious cuts in arts funding, there will always be someone who’ll say ‘no matter what happens to the funding, artists won’t stop making art’.

Last Friday to the HISEZ conference at the Centre for Health Sciences, which, incidentally, is one of the many remarkable new buildings which now grace Inverness.

I was travelling for most of last week, and so it was only while surfing the Internet on the train back from Edinburgh that, in the space of an hour, I learned of the deaths of two of my favourite writers, Frank Kermode and Edwin Morgan, both, coincidentally, aged 90.