by tim_bell | Jul 28, 2018 | Latest News
I’m spending my last weekend as an unpublished author. The final proof is away to the printer, the launch party is on Thursday – come if you can – and August will be busy with three Trainspotting tours a week. If you’ve been on a tour you’ll recognise the front cover....
by tim_bell | Jun 29, 2018 | Latest News
Well, wasn’t that a good Leith Festival? It’s lovely to see everyone out and enjoying the cosmopolitan community that Leith is. On a personal note, thanks to everyone who came on the Trainspotting tours, about forty over three evenings. The tours are...
by tim_bell | May 30, 2018 | Latest News
On a tour with some young Americans the other day I told them that The Scotsman wonders if Welsh can repeat the trick of changing national discourse in the field of American gun culture (see previous blogs). One bright young girl said she wasn’t sure if it was...
by tim_bell | Mar 31, 2018 | Latest News
Slightly to my surprise, The Scotsman published my letter and here: In your editorial Gunspotting (24 March) you credit Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting with as much influence on public discourse in its subject areas as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Grapes of Wrath and 1984 were...
by tim_bell | Mar 26, 2018 | Latest News
The “authorities”, or the “establishment”, are really changing their tune about Irvine Welsh. Twenty years ago he was a flash-in-the-pan author with a foul mind who celebrated hard drugs. Now that he has said his next work of fiction is to be...
by tim_bell | Mar 25, 2018 | Latest News
Irvine Welsh is often asked daft questions, and he’s given some daft answers in his time. But he’s dead right to condemn recent and proposed developments in Leith, generating headlines such as the one at the top of this, in The Scotsman. The old Caledonian...
by tim_bell | Mar 23, 2018 | Latest News
Here is my reply to my SNP MSP email to me, in the previous blog. Lines from his are in italics. …you’ve passionately put forward your point of view… Well, passion may be part of his repertoire, but I prefer stone-cold sober analysis and assessment. The matter in hand...
by tim_bell | Mar 21, 2018 | Latest News
Somewhat unexpectedly, a reply has come from my SNP MSP, given here in full (omitting only some courtesies). It came almost two weeks ago, just before I was leaving home, or it would have been up earlier – no disrespect intended. I will post my reply in the next...
by tim_bell | Feb 25, 2018 | Latest News
Oh dear, I just can’t used to how bad the SNP really is. The persistent calls for the right to call a referendum when they want to inspired this letter to the Herald, and it was published last week. I was hoping to start a rammy, but there’s been no...
by tim_bell | Jan 31, 2018 | Latest News
No, not a tribute to the Bard and his call for egalitarianism in his revolutionary poem A Man’s A Man For A’ That, although we increasingly look forward to the day when this ghastly, dysfunctional, unrepresentative, sense-of-entitlement...
