This month, I’m looking through a Glass Onion…

Gordon Craigie

THERE’S A Billy Bragg song that I occasionally (regularly?) cite in my defence when my long-suffering (her words!) wife wonders exactly what it is I do all day when there doesn’t appear (to her) to be an end product – very often a harsh but fair observation! In “Handyman Blues”, Billy laments the fact that he’s useless at DIY and points out to his better half that he’ll never be “the handyman around the house my father was”, a sentiment that 100% applies to me too – in fact, my preferred version of DIY is YDI… you do it! (It’s clearly a much better idea to get a man or woman in!) He goes on to point out that when she catches him reading the paper, or suchlike, he’s actually researching ideas that he’ll “turn to gold dust later, cause I’m a writer not a decorator”… Well, the gold dust part hasn’t happened for me yet, though we live in hope, but it is absolutely true that creative inspiration can be triggered by seemingly meaningless or random observations or thoughts and that, dear reader, is exactly how this month’s column was conceived.

Some of my, ahem, “research” is conducted while I’m pounding the pavements of Scotland’s sunniest city and, mainly to distract myself from the tedium of the long-distance runner, (well, medium distance!), listening to podcasts.