Is there any better way to measure the ages and stages of family life than by looking at the cars parked outside? Our first car was a Mini. She was beige and desperately unreliable, but she got us out of the city at weekends. In our early 20s that mainly meant we could go skiing… Read more »
Posts Categorized: HNM Column
End of an Era as MFR’s Tich McCooey hangs up his headphones
When Mr Marr and I left Edinburgh for Inverness 18 years ago, a colleague who had grown up in Elgin uttered two words. ‘Tich McCooey’. I had to ask him to repeat himself, and then I had to ask for an explanation. ‘Furry Mouth Radio’ was all I got. He told me to tune in… Read more »
Drams, Grace & Dignity, and papier-mâché
It’s World Whisky Day as I write this – a day which falls slap bang in the middle of Whisky Month. The temptation was to celebrate by making some of my own whisky because I am now ‘qualified’, having spent a day learning to become an Honorary Distiller at Benromach Distillery in Forres. My day… Read more »
Jobs for Life? Not any more.
It’s a tough time of year for Scottish teenagers with the SQA exams well underway. There is so much pressure – not just to be a teenager and all that that entails, but to study hard, to live up to parental and school expectations, and to get the best results possible. Only then will they… Read more »
A new political force for #GE2020 – yes please!
If you are reading this on Thursday, either the polling stations will be still open, or the count will be underway. If you are reading it on Friday or Saturday, we’ll have the headline results, and the ‘conversations in dark rooms’ will likely be taking place in and around Whitehall to determine the make-up of… Read more »
We have much to be proud of here – cheers!
I was pulling together a list of cultural events this week in preparation for a slot on a new radio show that is being piloted by the BBC. The first thing that struck me is just how much happens in our sparsely populated corner of the world. Anyone who thinks that ‘culture’ only happens in… Read more »
Libyan migrants. It’s time for humanity to kick in
As I write this at the beginning of the week, news reports are coming in of further distress calls from migrant boats in the Mediterranean Sea. At this time of year, people traffickers take advantage of warmer weather and calm seas to extort money from desperate North Africans, and pack them into unseaworthy vessels bound… Read more »
Pride comes before a fall…
It wasn’t quite on the agenda for our Easter holidays, but now that we’re getting over the drama of a nasty skiing accident which left Mr Marr with a double fracture of the shoulder and a hefty medical bill, we’re trying to look on the bright side. And watching him try to butter toast and… Read more »
The foolhardiness of leaving a teenager Home Alone…
It’s hard to know who the bigger fools were; me and Mr Marr, for imagining that our almost 17 year old was trustworthy enough to spend the night ‘home alone’, or Daughter #2, for imagining she could hold an almost-all-night house party for 30 of her friends without us finding out. It turns out that… Read more »
Happy Birthday Twitter, and underwhelmed, again!
Happy Birthday Twitter – the social media site turned nine years old this week. Let me put that into context; 2006 was the year that Gnarles Barkley’s ‘Crazy’ seemed to be at number 1 all summer, and the year Daniel Craig made his debut as Bond in Casino Royale. It took me a while to… Read more »