Hamlet talked of ‘shuffling off this mortal coil’ as a metaphor for death. To judge by the average zombie movie, that shuffling doesn’t end with death. The media have been full this week of hysterical coverage of Brad Pitt’s visit to Glasgow to star in the latest zombie epic (as a Glaswegian born and bred […]

Sometimes the gods are smiling, and sometimes they’re just having a good laugh. Two days travelling through Argyll exposed me to the best and worst of weathers. On Wednesday, driving back north from Inveraray through Glencoe, the sunshine was glorious, and I’ve never seen the Glen looking so lushly green. But just the evening before, […]

How do you judge a work of art that you can’t really see? Anyone who’s been tempted to lie flat on their back on the floor of the Sistine Chapel, or who’s waited impatiently for someone with the right change to pay for the light to come on in a gloomy Italian side chapel will […]

Back in 2003, when controversy was raging about the proposed transfer of the HQ of Scottish Natural Heritage from Edinburgh to Inverness, it was said that some SNH employees were objecting to the move on the grounds of the lack of culture in Scotland’s newest city. Well, that’s a charge that would be hard to […]

Up till now I’ve always found it easy to blog about our travels, and so had assumed that there would be nowhere that I couldn’t find something interesting to write about. But Berlin has nearly defeated me. So many people have already written so much about this extraordinary city, and after this, our first visit, […]

Hi, I’m Robert, and I’m a cultural omnivore. There is, I fear, no cure. I came across this useful term recently on an American website .  Cultural Omnivores, it seems, are those who regularly participate in a wide range of cultural activities, making little distinction been ‘high’ and ‘low ‘culture. Cultural Omnivorism is associated with […]

I’ll let you into a small secret — the original inspiration for starting this series of blogs was the weekly e-bulletin issued by Senscot’s co-Founder Laurence Demarco, which contains a wealth of useful information and links, but is made unmissable by Laurence’s very personal musings on his own life and the world around him. Often […]

Both by age and temperament—if not by celebrity–I’m an obvious candidate to join the ranks of TV’s ‘Grumpy Old Men’, and in that role I’d normally be the first to fulminate about ‘dumbing down’ as an inescapable fact of contemporary life.  So, for example, I was spitting expletives over the BBC Trust’s recent recommendation that […]

It looks like BBC 4 has uncovered another cult hit. ‘The Killing’ follows the police investigation of a murder over twenty days, one day per episode. It has a strong, believable, feisty heroine, a satisfying, complex plot, and excellent filming. We‘re going to have to work hard to keep up as BBC4 are cruelly showing […]

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. […]