A low mist lies on the Peebleshire hills. The morning air is still. At Brownsbank Cottage the garden is overgrown and the gate is unhinged. Looking out over the fields I can make out the remains of a Roman road. A relic of an imperious past.

Brownsbank is just a few hundred yards from the busy A702 and a short drive from Biggar. Yet it feels isolated. No other dwellings are in sight. There is no sound from the main road. No wind in the trees. Brownsbank is a world to itself.

The cottage is sandstone, maybe early 19th century with a more recent storm porch out front. Drainpipes, sills and the wonky gate had been painted a bold cerulean blue. The paintwork is now faded and chipped. A horseshoe is nailed to the inside front door. Alongside it are postcard-sized flags of Scotland, Cornwall, Ireland, the Isle of Man and Brittany: a Celtic commonwealth. A rusted oil lamp sits on the floor, unlit for half a century.

The first two flags represent the nationalities of Brownsbank’s most famous residents. Christopher Grieve, better known as the poet Hugh MacDiarmid, and his Cornish wife Valda lived here together for 37 years. At first they had no plumbing or electricity and existed in great poverty, Valda pickling onions and making huge curries on the open fire. Friends and admirers later provided the storm porch and rudimentary utilities. Ultimately, as MacDiarmid’s reputation grew, Brownsbank became a kind of literary court receiving eminent pilgrims from around the world to what one visitor described as a kind of “Left Bank meets sheep country”.

MacDiarmid died in 1978. Valda died in 1989. From 1993 to 2003 there were seven writers-in-residence at Brownsbank. One was the novelist James Robertson who later wrote of his experience:

I remember lying on top of Valda’s bed in my sleeping bag that first night, wondering if I had made a terrible mistake. In the roof space overhead, a large company of mice was practising eightsome reels. Outside, all was still and – in stark contrast to the southside of Glasgow I had left – the darkness was solid, ink-black. Whether it was colder outside than in, however, seemed debatable.

Waking each morning to multiple images of MacDiarmid staring at me from the walls as if urging me to get up and work, I got up and worked. I fitted my own few possessions in among those of the previous occupants – MacDiarmid’s collection of pipes, rows of green Penguin crime novels, in the bathroom the henna sachets Valda used to keep her hair startlingly orange – and lived for two years as a kind of tangible ghost haunting the past.

The decor was almost entirely Valda’s: curtains sewn from odd scraps of material, bookcases hammered together from crates, wally dugs, Cornish fishing floats hanging from the ceiling, bric-a-brac occupying every horizontal surface; outside, there were flower beds she had patiently created by collecting earth from molehills.

Valda was the powerhouse who kept things going. The poet did the washing up, but recognised how much she had sacrificed to his art. In one anthology of twentieth-century verse, still on a shelf, his handwritten dedication reads, “To Valda with all my love. Where would I – or Scots poetry – have been without her?”

A car pulls up. The driver is Denham MacDougall, one of the trustees of the charitable trust that aims to restore Brownsbank to its former glory and build a writer’s cabin next door. MacDougall, 75, started out an engineer but became a social worker. A dead poet has consumed his retirement. He unlocks the front door, which has a wooden knocker in the shape of a thistle, and lets me in.

Inside, Brownsbank is bare. The paint is peeling and the wallpaper torn. All the contents have been removed and put in storage, but not before a careful inventory was compiled and many photographs taken of exactly how it had been.

I immediately knew what Robertson was talking about when he mentioned ghosts. MacDiarmid is a presence in the empty cottage. His hurdies were warmed at this fireplace. His hand produced the patina on this door handle. His arse rested on this old-fashioned square wooden toilet seat. Was that a whiff of pipe smoke? No, surely just my imagination.

I told MacDougall I was writing an essay to mark the centenary of MacDiarmid’s masterpiece, A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, first published in 1926. He cooed with pleasure. What, I asked him, did he think the poem says to us today, 100 years on?

MacDougall pondered for a moment. “We’re a very different society,” he said. “We’re a very different Scotland. What can it say to us? Well, unto thine own self be true, really.

“And after that, treasure Scotland. Just treasure it. Open your eyes. Breathe it in. Yeah. And don’t be ashamed of being yourself.”

-o0o-

The consolations of secondhand bookshops are sweet and many. For example, sometimes you open a book and find a yellowing newspaper cutting about the author. An interview. A review. An obituary. For saddo bibliophiles like me, such moments pass as thrills.

So I was delighted as I stood in McNaughton’s, one of Edinburgh’s finest bookshops, with an opened copy of A Kist of Whistles in my hands. Inside was a newspaper cutting of a leader column from The Scotsman, published on Monday, September 11, 1978.

The headline was a single word: “MacDiarmid.”

I reproduce it here in full:

Scotland seems a colder and quieter place, since Christopher Murray Grieve died in the first hour of Saturday morning. He was in his eighty-seventh year, and had come to be recognised as one of the great European poets of this century. But reflections that he had lived as long as he could have wished, or that his work will be his immortality, don’t offer much comfort in this case. For 50 years this man’s hot and angry integrity radiated through Scotland. It burned holes in the blankets of national complacency, and it warmed those who often felt that their own country was a tundra in which the creators must freeze to death. His poetry may be enough for the rest of the world. Scotland needed the man himself, and needs him yet.

A “national poet” is a startling, even alarming possession for any small country. But Hugh MacDiarmid was no nineteenth-century romantic nationalist, to be statued in bronze with a scowl and a flying cloak. More than Petoefi for Hungary or Mickiewicz for Poland, MacDiarmid at once destroyed and created his nation. Into his furnace went folk-song, novels, bourgeois nationalism, the Kirk, the Burns cult, psychoanalysis and the whole self-regarding snapshot album of the Kailyard. Out of his forge came an energy which spread through Scottish cultural life. There is very little written, acted, composed, surmised or demanded in Scotland which does not in some strand descend from the new beginning he made.

It is a German notion that the life of the artist is the supreme, most significant expression of the life of his fellow-men. MacDiarmid, neither parochial nor unduly modest, savoured ideas like that. From a country of seamen and travellers, he journeyed further into the outer space of the mind than any contemporary. From a country of inventors, he brought forth a new poetic language and a new tradition of criticism. He sprang from a nation of guilty men and women seeking justification, and he gave to them a very special self-understanding, an identity card valid not so much in Britain or Europe as among the stars. He saw that Scotland needed “a great upswelling of the incalculable,” a flinging-away of spectacles and discarding of safety-belts, and his passing should be observed — as Norman MacCaig once wrote — by “a two-minute pandemonium.”

I spent many years writing newspaper leader columns and I know a good one when I see it. This was perhaps the best I had ever read. Inquiries later confirmed my suspicion it was written by Neal Ascherson, later to be one of our nation’s most celebrated intellectuals but in 1978 just a young journalist on the Scotsman’s politics staff.

For any Scot trying to live an examined life, Ascherson’s words are balm and affirmation. Scotland is a complex and confounding nation, full of wonders and exasperations. Couthiness passes as culture. Taking a scythe to tall poppies is the national pastime. Holy Willies break three commandments before breakfast. Joy, sex and intellectuals are frowned upon. Even the Catholics are Presbyterian.

MacDiarmid was, and remains, the antidote. Kicked out of the communists for being a nationalist and the nationalists for being a communist, he was a contrarian who pished on the chips of the po-faced and middle-browed. A national hero, he scorned the national movement and its “Scots Wha Ha’evers, village idiots, leaders of white-mouse factions and Commercial Calvinists”.

My essay was about a poem, yes. But it was also about a man and a nation and an entire world of possibility.

As a young student I had a postcard pinned to a wall next to the desk where I did my typing. It was a reproduction of an oil painting of MacDiarmid, looking heroic and windswept, by the artist Robert Heriot Westwater.

The postcard was an exhortation. To do what was unclear. But to do something, despite everything. And to do it while being true to myself.

MacDiarmid insisted we be ourselves and whoever we wanted to be. Rooted in the local, he was the prism through which we could see the infinite, the universal.

-o0o-

On October 22, 1992, Seamus Heaney stood up in a hall at Oxford University to give a lecture on Hugh MacDiarmid. In a five-year stint as professor of poetry he was contracted to give three public lectures a year, ten of which would later be published by Faber as The Redress of Poetry. In 1995 Heaney would be awarded the Nobel prize for literature. His Oxford lectures would come to be regarded as his definitive statement on his art form.

Some of the world’s finest poets were examined in the lectures: Christopher Marlowe; W.B. Yeats; Dylan Thomas; Philip Larkin. MacDiarmid was perhaps the least known of Heaney’s selection, at least within the Oxbridge-anointed canon of Eng Lit.

Heaney’s lecture was notable first for the unsparing way he exposed MacDiarmid’s many and egregious flaws. Much of the poet’s later work was machine-gunned. MacDiarmid, he said, was “one of the most excessive writers of the twentieth century”. He was guilty of “astounding self-inflation” and often “strayed into megalomaniac fantasy”. His work had “a disconcerting unevenness”.

Heaney deals with this head-on:

Anybody who wishes to praise the work has to admit straight away that there is an un-get-roundable connection between the prodigality of his gifts and the prodigiousness of his blather.

Heaney accepts this was a deliberate choice on the part of the poet. In a letter to a BBC producer in the 1960s, MacDiarmid wrote:

My job, as I see it, has never been to lay a tit’s egg, but to erupt like a volcano, emitting not only flame but a lot of rubbish.

Heaney believed MacDiarmid was worth the hard work. His achievement, said the younger poet, was unquestionable on two fronts.

First, MacDiarmid more or less singlehandedly created an entire literature from what Heaney called “the vernacular Scots of the Borders and Lowlands”, generously seasoned with antique words culled from Scottish dictionaries. The poems he wrote in this “synthetic Scots” stood comparison with anything else written anywhere in the first half of the 20th century. MacDiarmid saw in this language the possibility of opening a Scottish window on the human condition. He would be rooted in place but not constrained by place. Not in the slightest. In fact the unapologetic Scottishness of MacDiarmid’s poetry would be the secret of its universality.

Second, Heaney saw MacDiarmid as “in many respects analogous” to Ireland’s W.B. Yeats. Both men were cultural and political nationalists who reimagined their nations on an epic scale, liberated from English rule, free to exist truly as themselves. Both poets embarked on this task of national renewal with extraordinary intellectual energy and ambition.

Yeats and MacDiarmid actually met, although Heaney does not mention this in his lecture. The encounter happened on a Friday night in the summer of 1928 in the Dublin home of a prominent Irish journalist called George William Russell. The evening was dominated by an unsatisfactory discussion about economics. When Yeats got up to leave in the small hours of Saturday morning, MacDiarmid went with him and they walked the nighttime streets of Dublin for around an hour. In MacDiarmid’s telling, at one point Yeats excused himself and said: “I must urinate.” MacDiarmid joined him and they both peed in the middle of the road.

MacDiarmid would later recall that moment:

I crossed swords with him and we became very friendly after that.

Now that would be a fine addition to Dublin’s collection of literary sculptures. A poetic Manneken Pis, with a water feature.

Heaney is full of admiration for A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle. The title of his Oxford lectures was The Redress of Poetry, the word redress being a hunting term meaning to bring hounds back onto the proper scent. MacDiarmid’s greatest poem, says Heaney, demonstrates poetry’s power:

This poem is MacDiarmid's masterpiece. Even if his political programme failed to materialize, even if the nationalism and socialism which he espoused found themselves unrealized and unpopular, even if his vernacular republic did not attain constitutional status, the fact is that A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle did achieve the redress of poetry. MacDiarmid created a fully realized, imaginatively coherent work, one that contained such life-enhancing satire, such emotional weight and such specific imaginative gravity that it could be placed in the mind's scales as something both equal to and corrective of the prevailing conditions. It was a magnificent intervention by creative power into an historical situation. Its force was the force of the glimpsed alternative and it still gives credence to MacDiarmid's wonderfully stirring affirmation in another context that poetry is human existence come to life. In the year of its publication, it may have sold only ninety-nine copies, but already it was on its way to that most important audience of all, 'the reader in posterity'.

-o0o-

A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle is 2,685 lines long and was a year in the making. The idea for the poem came from a friend of MacDiarmid, a composer called Francis George Scott, who said to him one day: “Write a poem about a drunk man looking at the thistle.” Scott also helped shape and guide the work in the course of its creation and compilation.

In his later years MacDiarmid recalled:

The idea stuck in my head. And I realised he had presented me with a viable idea. The thistle wasn’t only the symbol of Scottish nationality but it was also a symbol of the miseries and grandeurs of the human fate in general.

Most of the poem was written when MacDiarmid and his first wife Peggy were living in Montrose, a seaside town halfway between Dundee and Aberdeen on Scotland’s east coast. Aged 34, he was working as a journalist on a local newspaper, the Montrose Review, cycling from story to story on a pushbike. The hours were nine to five, Monday to Friday, and nine til twelve on a Saturday. Home was a white-harled, semi-detatched council house at 16 Links Avenue, with a book-filled shed in the back garden where MacDiarmid would write his poetry as well as articles for a range of literary and political periodicals. He was also serving on the town council as an Independent Socialist, campaigning unsuccessfully against wage cuts for council workers. In photographs from that time MacDiarmid looks gaunt, a fact he attributed to having most of his teeth removed while in the army, using a half bottle of whisky as an anaesthetic.

On February 12, 1926, the Glasgow Herald published six extracts from what would become A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle. This was a tiny fraction of the poem as a whole but it displayed for all to see the scope of MacDiarmid’s ambition. As Alan Bold, in his meticulous biography of the poet, said of the extracts:

In these poems MacDiarmid addressed Dostoevsky, catalogued hallucinations, compared his thought to the movement of moonlight, contrasted the wanderings of the Drunk Man with the odyssey of Ulysses, translated Ramaekers, and picked the skeletal bones of Truth.

Notice had been duly served.

Originally conceived at 600 lines, the poem kept growing. Bold says MacDiarmid was “possessed by the spirit of the poem”. Lines were scribbled on fag packets and toilet paper. Cues were taken from the news of the day. That year saw the General Strike, and MacDiarmid’s dismay at the outcome - “the fond hope brocht to nocht” - inspired 24 verses.

MacDiarmid was disputational by temperament. If he had no-one to argue with he could always argue with himself, the Scottish antisyzygy personified. As Bold put it:

By being both Grieve and MacDiarmid there was a bonus that the poet appreciated: he could generate a movement from the friction of one mind on the other.

At the poem’s heart is the jaggy thistle, which also happens to be the emblem of this Substack newsletter. The thistle is a symbol of the pride and prickliness of Scotland and the Scots. You can find it on pound coins, on Timorous Beasties wallpaper, on the masthead of The Scotsman newspaper, on the Peter Blake-designed carpet in the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland. In the poem the thistle shapeshifts to express the political, the personal, the philosophical.

And so the thistle is, variously:

• “A symbol o’ the puzzle o’ man’s soul”.

• “The tree that fills the universe”. Like Yggdrasil, the giant ash in Norse mythology that spans the ancient world, its roots tapping into magical wells.

• A cross on which every Scot is crucified.

• A phallic symbol, giving the term “grasp the thistle” an obviously sexual connotation. Paging Dr Freud.

In Bold’s biography there is much discussion of the Russian and European thinkers who influenced the poem. Such discussion is daunting. Or at least it is to me. I admit I know nothing of Shestov, Solovyov, Tyutchev and Spengler. I imagine some Jaggy Thistle readers will be aghast at my ignorance. But I would argue you do not need an encyclopaedic knowledge of early 20th century political philosophy, nor even the complete canon of Scottish literature, to appreciate MacDiarmid’s greatest work.

To my mind there are two ways to read this poem. I tried both while preparing this essay. I started out with an annotated volume (Kenneth Buthlay’s Scottish Academic Press edition, from 1987, if you must know), taking time to check the meaning of every unfamiliar Scots word and every obscure cultural or political reference. The problem with this approach is it takes you down a succession of rabbit holes. A reference appears. Oh, that’s interesting. Ten minutes later you are still on the same page of the poem, but have a greater understanding of Nietzsche or Melville or Schoenberg or Dunbar.

About a third of the way through I started reading the poem straight, letting unfamiliar words and names wash over me, enjoying them purely for their music and sensation. At one point I tried reading the lines out loud falling, despite myself, into a declamatory tone of voice that was part Burns Supper recitation and part Wee Free sermonising.

The poem is full of squalls. But then all of a sudden the rough seas are silenced and calm descends. I was reminded of a Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds concert I attended when, after half an hour of experimental noise making, of scratchy guitar and screeching violin, Cave sat down at the piano and, with great tenderness, sang Into My Arms.

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A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle was published by Blackwood & Sons on November 22, 1926, with a nine-page glossary of Scots words, in an edition of 500 copies, selling at five shillings and sixpence a copy. I am very happy to say I have one of those first editions, bought from the aforementioned McNaughton’s bookshop.

MacDiarmid wrote to a friend: “I expect little kudos, and less cash, for it.” Early reviewers were unimpressed. The Glasgow Evening News said: “All the worst faults of Mr Grieve’s literary ideals will be found fully exemplified in the long poem which he has just published under his mysterious pseudonym of Hugh MacDiarmid.” The Press & Journal in Aberdeen noted MacDiarmid’s “constant plangent grieving over his inhibitions”.

MacDiarmid pored over every word in every review and took the criticism badly. A more positive review in the Irish Statesman restored his confidence somewhat, as did one from fellow poet Edwin Muir:

The flow, vigour, variety, wit and originality of [Drunk Man] are its greatest virtues…this is probably the only poem of importance which has appeared in Scots since the death of Burns.

Recognition from the rareified heights of English Literature was scant. To a certain kind of English ear, MacDiarmid was unbearable. Philip Larkin’s Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse ignored Drunk Man entirely. In a letter to a friend, Hull’s finest librarian wrote of MacDiarmid: “I am so averse from his work I can hardly bring my eyes to the page.”

-o0o-

Every five years, after elections to Holyrood, the reigning British monarch attends the official opening of a new Scottish parliament. These are festive occasions. Everyone is dressed in their Sunday best. Scottish National Party MSPs all wear a small white rose as a buttonhole, as if they are at a wedding.

They do so in honour of Hugh MacDiarmid and a short poem he published in 1934, his collection Stony Limits:

The rose of all the world is not for me.

I want for my part

Only the little white rose of Scotland

That smells sharp and sweet — and breaks the heart.

This always struck me as curious. This is a party eager to present itself as internationalist. The SNP spent decades countering the accusation it was a redoubt of 19th-century blood-and-soil nation-state nationalism. And yet its parliamentarians, every five years since 1999, proudly wear a symbol of declaratory isolationism.

MacDiarmid’s relationship with mainstream Scottish nationalism has always been tempestuous and contradictory.

In 1928 he was a founding member, alongside the great adventurer R.B. Cunninghame Graham and former Glasgow University student leader John MacCormick, of the National Party of Scotland. This would merge in 1934 with the Scottish Self-Government Party to form the SNP.

Almost immediately, MacDiarmid pissed everybody off. MacCormick, in his memoir The Flag In The Wind, expressed dismay at the way MacDiarmid “hurled contempt at everything English”.

Although I have no doubt that he has done invaluable work in the whole field of Scottish literature I am certain that C.M. Grieve has been politically one of the greatest handicaps with which any national movement could have been burdened. His love of bitter controversy, his extravagant and self-assertive criticism of the English, and his woolly thinking, which could encompass within one mind the doctrines both of Major Douglas [C.H.Douglas, the economist behind the concept of social credit] and Karl Marx, were taken by the more sober-minded of the Scots as sufficient excuse to condemn the whole case for Home Rule out of hand.

It was MacCormick who would send the letter informing MacDiarmid he was expelled from the National Party for extremism.

In 1923, three years before the publication of A Drunk Man, MacDiarmid published two essays in Scottish Nation called ‘Plea for a Scottish Fascism’ and ‘Programme for a Scottish Fascism’. He called for a “native species” of the fascism displayed by Mussolini on his October 1922 march to Rome.

MacDiarmid wrote:

We want a Scottish Fascism which shall be, where such laws are concerned, a lawless believer in law - a rebel believer in authority.

MacDiarmid was not the only writer in the 1920s to flirt with fascism. Alan Bold points out that Eliot, Pound, Yeats and Wyndham Lewis - “all egoists with an elitist outlook” - were similarly entranced.

You might have thought MacDiarmid’s dalliance with Mussolini reason enough for 21st century politicians to have some reservations about celebrating him. You would be wrong. Even in an SNP that has followed to the letter the Philip Gould programme for political modernisation, MacDiarmid remains the spirit animal of Scottish nationalism, his instincts shared by people who will never read a line of his poetry.

Why?

I think it’s because MacDiarmid represents l’Ecosse profonde, a deeper and sometimes darker Scotland than the chirpy, shiny one presented to the world today. This Scotland is obstinate rather than proud; antagonistic rather than passionate; nationalist rather than internationalist. It makes little effort to conceal its aversion to England and the English. MacDiarmid once told his friend Norman MacCaig his general rule in life was: “Think of the English and do the opposite.”

L’Ecosse profonde, in this nationalist manifestation, sees opposition to independence as a moral deficiency, a character flaw.

As MacDiarmid wrote in Lament for the Great Music:

These denationalised Scots have killed the soul

Which is universally human; they are men without souls;

All the more heavily the judgment falls upon them,

Since it is a universal law of life they have sinned against.

Adherents of a United Kingdom are, it seems, barely human.

MacDiarmid specifically drew attention to these lines when he gave a political speech to the 1320 Club, in April 1968, in which he denounced “the particular kind of treachery found in those Anglo-Scots intellectuals” who “bleat” about independence.

Accusing fellow Scots of treachery and questioning whether they have souls is not the nationalism of the modern SNP. In fact successive SNP leaders over the past decade have given thoughtful interviews in which they have expressed disquiet with the presence of the word “national” in the party name. Many left-leaning SNP folk bristle if you dare call them nationalists.

So how do we explain the small white rose worn by SNP MSPs? I see it as an aberration, but a revealing one: a rare moment when the party behaves like the broader nationalist movement, and hopes nobody notices.

MacDiarmid is a hero of the movement rather than a hero of its political wing. The two sides have always had an uneasy relationship. The tension between them is an under-explored facet of contemporary Scottish politics.

Only a fool would try to divine what MacDiarmid would make of the modern SNP. So here goes.

MacDiarmid would be appalled. He would scorn the sight of John Swinney singing God Save the King at the opening ceremony of the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow. He would see devolution as a betrayal, a lickspittle accommodation with perfidious Albion. But his distaste for the SNP’s politics would be as nothing compared to his distaste for its culture.

He would see a national party wilfully blind to the national faults he spent a lifetime skewering without fear or favour. To declare, as MacDiarmid did, that the nation’s malaise could be attributed to Scottish national traits - couthiness, conformity, Calvinism - is today a solecism. It is bad manners. It is anti-social behaviour. Scotland today can only be conceived as an unalloyed good: idealised, homogenised, and much less interesting than the complex reality.

The modern SNP’s kumbaya Caledonianism is an ill fit with the party’s favourite poet.

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If MacDiarmid’s political aim for Scotland remains unfulfilled, his linguistic legacy is all too successful.

The Scots language these days gives the impression of being in robust health. No longer is it beaten out of children at school. On the contrary, it forms part of how children learn to read, write and talk. But it comes in many forms and its impact is uneven.

Scots is strongest when it is local. I was born in Dundee, in a working class community on the Hilltown. Scots is my native tongue. But the Scots I spoke at home and in the backlands of our tenement was very different to the Scots spoken by children in Forfar or Arbroath, 14 and 17 miles away respectively. The way those teuchters spoke - their syntax, their lexis, their accent - was barely comprehensible to me. It still is.

When I first started listening to Billy Connolly records in the 1970s, I did not understand the words he used. What was a wean? Did he mean a bairn?

What passes these days as “the Scots tung”, in forms as varied as children’s literature and the official pronouncements of the Scottish Parliament, is a gallimaufry. It is drawn from the poetry of Burns and Henryson; from the rich and complex language spoken at all levels of Lowland society in the 17th century and earlier; from a random plundering of Jameson’s Scottish Dictionary, published in 1867, unearthing words buried for hundreds of years; and from the diverse strains of local vernacular spoken today across the nation, differing wildly from coast to coast, from housing scheme to farmyard.

All these elements are vital on their own terms. All should be celebrated. All should be cherished. And yet their synthesis today is strangely lifeless.

Why? Because nobody speaks Synthetic Scots. Scots speak the Scots of their home town or home county. Someone in Ayrshire does not use the Doric of Aberdeenshire. Glaswegians speak like Glaswegians. Border chiels speak like Border chiels. Dundonians speak Dundonian.

Scotland is multicultural and multilingual. Marvellously so. So why bland it out? Why chuck it all into a linguistic Magimix? For what purpose?

I have a book on my shelves called Unstated: Writers on Scottish Independence, which can kindly be described as a mixed bag. One of the best contributions comes from Tom Leonard, a sceptic about independence, with a two-line poem:

The local is the international.

The national is the parochial.

Would it make sense for someone in England to create a new language made up of local dialects from Devon, Yorkshire and Norfolk, lumped together with Chaucer, and teach it in schools as English? No. That would be inauthentic. It would be, well, synthetic. And yet this is the orthodoxy in Scotland.

MacDiarmid was clear about the artificiality of what he was doing. Alan Bold describes Synthetic Scots as “a fusion of all Scotland’s linguistic resources - the oral rhythms of the various dialects, the lexical density of dictionary Scots, the lyrical qualities of literary Scots”.

A literary device, then, not a living language.

Synthetic Scots only works, insofar as it works at all, on the page. Tom Leonard taught us that language does not come from the written word. In the beginning, he said, was not the word but the sound. And the sound can only be local, not national. The opposite of synthetic is organic. Organic Scots, not Synthetic Scots, is what we should be teaching in our schools.

MacDiarmid’s oeuvre is a bravura intellectual exercise, repurposing lost words from centuries past in order to find a new-minted way of being wholly modern. Freed from the cultural and canonical assumptions of English, a new world could be imagined. A new nation too, perhaps.

As Seamus Heaney noted, this was a literary achievement of the first order, placing MacDiarmid in the ranks of the greatest poets of the early 20th century. A hundred years on, it is for us to decide what to take from MacDiarmid’s legacy. We do not need to swallow it whole.

There are many lessons 21st century Scotland could have learned from MacDiarmid. He could have inspired us to new heights of courage, creativity, audacity. Such a bold, daring, mettlesome nation has proved elusive. Instead, on language, we have taken him literally.

It is not much of a leap from synthetic language to synthetic politics. The SNP is a national party. The clue is in the name. Other, more local identities are not to be encouraged. Localism must play second fiddle to nationalism. Many folk I know consider themselves first a Glaswegian, a Dundonian, a Highlander, a Shetlander, and a Scot second. This is awkward in a Scotland where national identity is primary and paramount.

And so, for example, regional police forces must be replaced with one national force. Before this “rationalisation”, most Scots could name their chief constable. Now, gey few can name the chief constable of Police Scotland, let alone the senior officer responsible for policing in Edinburgh or Glasgow or Dundee or Aberdeen. Local accountability is less important than the projection of national authority. Right now, under a new UK prime minister, English-style regional government with elected mayors or provosts must be resisted as if a contagion. City states cannot be allowed to rival the national parliament. All local difference must be subsumed to the national imperative.

Synthetic Scots may have begun as a linguistic device but it has become a political strategy. MacDiarmid would doubtless be appalled at the misuse of his creation. But he is still to blame.

-o0o-

Christopher Grieve died aged 86 at 3am on September 9, 1978, at the Chalmers Hospital in Edinburgh, where he had been receiving treatment for cancer. The funeral was in his home town of Langholm. Mourners gathered under umbrellas to stave off the drizzle. An oration was given over the grave by Norman MacCaig:

He would walk into my mind as if it were a town and he a torchlight procession of one, lighting up the streets of my mind and some of the nasty little things that were burrowing in the corners.

MacCaig could always be relied upon to find the right words. In a compendium of poems published to commemorate MacDiarmid’s life, the bard of Leamington Terrace again hit the mark, this time with a short work, almost a haiku, called Old Poet.

The alder tree,

shrivelled by the salt wind,

has lived so long

it has carried and sheltered

its own weight

of nests.

No-one who lives a life of the mind, whose job is to think and write, could hope for a finer epitaph. In those nests was fledged a flock of ideas that populate contemporary Scottish thought, for good and ill.

When Grieve was born, he was described by his mother as “an eaten and spewed lookin’ wee thing wi’ een like twa burned holes in a blanket”.

A century on from the publication of A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, those eyes stare at us still.

-o0o-

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“A chield’s amang you takin notes, And faith he’ll prent it.”

Robert Burns

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Usually at this time of the year we are slap-bang in the middle of the silly season. Most politicians and lobby hacks are sunning themselves on a beach somewhere. There is no news. Nevertheless, newspapers and TV bulletins must be filled. And so mid-August sees endless column inches about great white sharks spotted off Cornish beaches. Celebrity trysts get even more coverage than usual. An escaped animal of some sort is always a good bet.

This year is different. This summer politics - both British and Scottish - is changing. In Andy Burnham we have a new prime minister determined to reshape the Labour government in his image. And north of the border the resignation of Anas Sarwar has necessitated a leadership election in Scottish Labour.

Call me a geek but I live for moments like this. When politics is in a groove it is hard to shift it from its trajectory. New ideas struggle to find purchase. Only at times of change is there an opportunity for a radical new direction. This summer is one such time. It is an opportunity to update our politics for a transformed world. This can be a hinge moment, by which I mean an opportunity to open a new door.

I may have mentioned before on The Jaggy Thistle that I am an adherent of the adage, attributed to Gramsci, that politics requires pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will. Usually in political journalism there is plenty of the former but little of the latter. And yet without a degree of can-do optimism fuck-all gets done.

In that spirit I see possibility in this summer of political change. First, because Burnham’s determination to decentralise power in the British state gives permission, I think, for greater change in Scotland than would have been possible under Keir Starmer. And second, because a leadership contest north of the border creates the circumstances for an overdue conversation about what Scottish Labour is for.

As my contribution to this conversation I am removing the paywall on two Jaggy Thistle essays which I hope can be useful.

The first is this long essay from May this year:

In this essay I describe the century-long civil war within Scottish Labour between nationalism and unionism. And I argue the party needs to rediscover the effortless small-n nationalism of Donald Dewar if it is to once more be the party of the Scottish working class.

The other essay is from September 2024:

In this essay I make the case for codifying in British law a route for Scotland to exit the UK. I point to arrangements for a border poll in Northern Ireland as a useful model. And I argue such a move could be transformative for Scottish politics, removing a legitimate grievance and allowing more of a focus on improving Scotland in the here and now.

These, in my view, are the two big strategic questions a new Scottish Labour leader must grapple with.

I’ve been discussing this in The Times, where I write a weekly column on Scottish politics.

Recently I posed a question:

In the early days of the Scottish parliament, Alex Salmond was fond of using a phrase that drove me bats. The SNP, he liked to say, was perfectly content being the main opposition party. Why so? “Because oppositions have a habit of turning into governments.”

This really annoyed me. I found Salmond’s attitude complacent and entitled. Was it for this that folk had fought for home rule? For the SNP to claim Buggins’s turn?

Even more annoying, Salmond was right. Eventually voters tired of the Lib-Lab coalition that governed Scotland for the first eight years of devolution. A modernised SNP looked fresh and shiny. It offered free stuff. Sure enough, in 2007 the opposition became the government.

Salmond died in 2024, but is he still right? Do oppositions still have a habit of turning into governments? Or has politics here in Scotland shifted so dramatically the old rules no longer apply?

These were, of course, rhetorical questions. My view is that the pendulum is stuck. Only a transformed Scottish Labour party has the chance to unstick it.

Like many nations in the western world, Scotland has become consumed by issues of national identity and belonging. Labour’s dilemma, I suggested in this recent column, was an eternal one:

When society shifts, do you follow it? Or do you stay true to the principles that opposed that shift in the first place?

Labour has faced that question numerous times in the past 50 years. The lesson has always been the same. When it held tight and kept singing the old songs, as it did in 1983, it was punished. When it changed with a changing world, as it did in 1997, it won with a landslide.

One of my many frustrations with Labour is that people who were prepared to reach an accommodation with Thatcherism in the form of New Labour in the 1990s, and who pandered to Reform-curious “hero voters” in 2024, are seemingly incapable of a similar reckoning with nationalist-minded Scots.

Labour can resist that nationalism and keep on losing. Or it can embrace it, yoke it to Labour values and have a chance of winning again. The entry ticket for Scottish politics in 2026 is an easy, instinctive and unforced ability to put Scotland first. Only then can a politician be granted any kind of hearing. Whoever emerges victorious from this leadership contest needs to convince nationalist-minded Scots that Labour does not see them as the enemy.

Members of all political parties, in my experience, like to think of themselves as keepers of a flame. This matters deeply to them. Often it is a flame passed down through generations. Questions of strategy are freighted with emotion. Sometimes holding true to an old nostrum is preferable to compromise, even if compromise is the price of power.

I wonder if this is where the Scottish Labour membership finds itself at the moment. To be blunt, I wonder if they would rather lose than change. Even if such a loss risks a last flicker of the flame.

If you detect in this last line more pessimism of the intellect than optimism of the will then you are probably right.

I hope, but I am not hopeful.

The full Scottish Labour leadership contest is just starting, with three candidates: Michael Marra, Monica Lennon and Joe Fagan.

We shall return to this subject once we have heard what they have to say.

In the meantime, please let me know your views. Given the need for a wide-ranging discussion I am making the comments section on this post open to all.

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“A chield’s amang you takin notes, And faith he’ll prent it.”

Robert Burns

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A few weeks ago I wrote a Jaggy Thistle post about Andy Burnham’s dress sense. I coined the term “Andycore” for Burnham’s smart-casual approach to political menswear. And I set out the seven rules of Andycore, from his jacket-and-t-shirt look to his favoured brands.

Shortly afterwards I received an email from a …

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To Dundee, where my favourite band is playing at the Caird Hall. Hard to believe, but this is the first time in Belle & Sebastian’s 30-year career they have gigged in Dundee. How could this possibly be? Did they think there were no fey, wan hipsters in my home city? Did they think the only cool kids in Scotland were sitting under a tree in Kelvingrove Park, wearing corduroys and reading slim volumes of 19th-century poetry? How wrong they were.

First, a fortifying plate of chilli with my brother in The Phoenix, one of my favourite bars in the whole world. How can you resist a pub that has a quote from a Robert Frost poem above the door?

Here are your waters and your watering place. Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.

The lines are from Frost’s 1947 poem Directive, a meditation on loss, refuge and making peace with yourself.

Belle & Sebastian are on a world tour playing their first two albums in full, on consecutive nights, plus their greatest hits. In Dundee it was If You’re Feeling Sinister, the album that features a photo of Ciara MacLaverty, daughter of the novelist Bernard MacLaverty, on the cover.

For true fans the Dundee gig was exciting for a particularly geeky reason: it was the first time the band would play their song Seymour Stein, which mentions Dundee in the lyric, to a Dundee audience.

The song is about the eponymous record company executive who signed Madonna, Talking Heads and The Ramones, and who was a big B&S fan:

Promises of fame, promises of fortune
LA to New York, San Francisco back to Boston
Has he ever seen Dundee?
Won't he hire a limousine?
Seymour send her back to me.

Yes, it rhymes Dundee with limousine. The crowd went wild.

The concert was a joy. I’m not ashamed to say I cried. In fact I think I

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Last year I went to Budapest with my oldest friends for a lads’ weekend. These boys get thirsty. And so, because I am no longer much of a drinker, I excused myself one afternoon and went hunting for bookshops.

I was very taken with Massolit, an English language bookshop and cafe in the Jewish quarter. But my favourite was Atlantisz Book Island, in downtown Pest, with a multilingual stock strong on art and philosophy.

This is a bookshop unafraid to be intellectual. So much so, its tote bag bears a quote from Wittgenstein: “Words are deeds.”

In Atlantisz two particular books caught my eye. One was called Assholes. Mercifully this was not a lavishly illustrated anatomical guide. It was a study of bad behaviour written by a philosophy professor.

The other was Seven Types of Atheism, by John Gray. Previously I only knew Gray from his New Statesman essays. These are always pungent, punchy and full of learning. Usually they describe, with fascinating cultural and intellectual references, why the world is a shambles and why we’re all fucked. After reading one of his pieces I usually feel a combination of exhilaration and depression.

Gray is an interesting man. The son of a South Shields docker, he has taught philosophy at Harvard, Yale, Oxford and the LSE. Unlike many in his field he is unabashed about stepping into the world of contemporary politics, sometimes wearing tackety boots.

I consider myself an atheist. Sometimes, to be more specific, a Catholic atheist. I feel it would be foolish to deny the effect a Catholic upbringing has had on my moral and political outlook, quite apart from the existence or otherwise of an omniscient God.

And yet, despite atheism being a key component of my personal worldview, it is not something to which I have given much thought. In fact I have thought much more about religion than about the absence of religion. What exactly one means by the term Humanist, for example, is somewhat blurry in my mind.

In the Atlantisz Book Island, I decided it was time to remedy this sin of omission.

Gray is brutally condescending about what he sees as the intellectual vacuity of the prevailing strain of atheism in 21st century Britain. Many atheists, he says, are simply looking for “freedom from thinking”. Modern atheism is, he says, “mostly a media phenomenon and best appreciated as a type of entertainment”. The most common error, says Gray, is to reject monotheism simply to replace it with something that has all the characteristics of the very same monotheism.

Contemporary atheism is a flight from a godless world. Life without any power that can secure order or some kind of ultimate justice is a frightening and for many an intolerable prospect. In the absence of such a power, human events could finally be chaotic, and no story could be told that satisfied the need for meaning.

Struggling to escape this vision, atheists have looked for surrogates of the God they have cast aside. The progress of humanity has replaced belief in divine providence. But this faith in humanity makes sense only if it continues ways of thinking that have been inherited from monotheism. The idea that the human species realises common goals throughout history is a secular avatar of a religious idea of redemption.

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Gray is at his best when he draws a distinction between two concepts we might previously have considered to be synonymous. For example, faith and belief. Faith, he says, is trust in an unknown power. Belief, on the other hand, is as important to the secular world as it is to the religious.

Much of what passes as science, says Gray, is as open to doubt as the miracles of Fatima and Lourdes. “Wander among the shelves of the social science stacks in university libraries,” says Gray, “and you will find yourself in a mausoleum of dead theories.” Science requires us to believe in things that may just be the latest iteration of human understanding, to be replaced at some point in the future with another, often very different version.

The atheist reflex to replace religion with science is, says Gray, a category error. And he draws another excellent distinction, between explanation and meaning:

Scientific inquiry answers a demand for explanation. The practice of religion expresses a need for meaning, which would remain unsatisfied even if everything could be explained.

In his final chapter Gray offers some good advice:

If you want to understand atheism and religion, you must forget the popular notion that they are opposites. If you can see that a millenarian theocracy in early sixteenth-century Munster has in common with Bolshevik Russia and Nazi Germany, you will have a clearer view of the modern scene.

In closing, he recognises this is a subject that talks to a deep human need. The philosopher turns counsellor:

There is no need for panic or despair. Belief and unbelief are poses the mind adopts in the face of an unimaginable reality. A godless world is as mysterious as one suffused with divinity, and the difference between the two may be less than you think.

So, what are these seven types of atheism? Does yours, or mine, meet Gray’s exacting standards? And where has this book left my views on some of life’s most fundamental intellectual frameworks?

1. The New Atheism

Gray can barely contain his contempt for this type of atheist. He says this self-important view of the world, popularised by thinkers such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, “contains little that is novel or interesting”. The New Atheism sets out with a swaggering confidence to

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I’ve been waiting for a fashion editor somewhere to run the definitive piece on Andy Burnham’s dress sense. No such article has been commissioned so I thought I’d better write it myself.

I am, after all, a fashion maven. Anna Wintour, eat your heart out. This devil wears Do…

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Three years ago I started this Substack with two aims. One was to earn a little money. The Times, where I was a staff writer, had cut back its Scottish budget and reduced my hours. I could have filled this gap in the Farquharson household finances by doing what many journalists of my vinta…

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It’s been a while since I did one of these Notebook round-ups of what’s caught my eye in the cultural world. Note to self: do this more often. Today I have new albums for you from three tremendous Scottish acts, reflecting the extraordinary range of music on offer in this pawky wee nation of ours. Don’t just stream them. Buy their downloads or vinyl. Go see them live. Buy their merch. Support Scottish music.

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1. Anoraq: An August Work Party

What I love about the Glasgow music scene is the same thing I love about Glasgow’s visual art scene. The city is full of people whose primary loyalty is to their art. Sure, success and recognition would be great. Some money would be particularly welcome. But they are not interested in following a formula for commercial success. What matters to them is honing their craft in whatever obscure discipline they call their own, even if it is one they have invented. What matters is being true to their vision, true to themselves, true to their art.

How do you describe the music of Anoraq, a Glasgow act with a new mini-album out this month? Well, you let the band do it for you. On their Bandcamp page they say this:

Anoraq weaves field recordings, electronic ambient production and acoustic instrumentation with spoken word and song to explore Scotland's ecological consciousness.

The band are part of a subculture on the Glasgow music scene where atmospheric instrumental music is married with the spoken word. The spiritual home of this tribe is King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut, where Anoraq have curated monthly evenings with likeminded souls, under the name Inside Voices.

Anoraq defy easy categorisation. The band is confidently, resolutely, comfortably itself. This is not pop music packaged for the music industry. This is a much more interesting proposition: a handful of prodigiously talented young men using sound and word to explore notions of nature, community and home.

Upfront is the voice of Patrick Romero McCafferty: sometimes speaking, sometimes rhyming, sometimes singing. McCafferty has Mexican and Scottish roots and is a published poet - I can recommend his debut slim volume glass.knot.sun, published by Ignition Press. His writing is meditative, sometimes melancholy, and unfashionably lyrical.

The musical anchor is Tim Martin-Ciubotaru, Edinburgh-born of Irish and Romanian parentage, on guitars. He is joined by Lewis Hall on keyboards and electronics, Shetlander Peter Kay on fiddle, and one of my favourite drummers, Alex Palmer.

Palmer’s drumming is scratchy, restless, untethered, instinctive. It provides the ideal frame for tracks where nothing is settled, where anything can happen.

Anoraq’s soundscapes are expansive and detailed. Fans of Scottish music may pick up traces of post-rockers Mogwai; of Aidan Moffat’s solo albums; of Belle and Sebastian’s A Century of Elvis; of half-forgotten Scottish bands such as My Latest Novel.

Outwith the homeland, the aural collages of Claire Rousay, another magpie of sound, come to mind.

But Anoraq’s audio is all their own.

There is a lightness and spaciousness about An August Work Party that deserves a much wider audience. What I find tremendously appealing about Anoraq is their sincerity. The music business is full of cynics and ironists. Anoraq are the perfect antidote.

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This mini-album is just 28 minutes long and it was too short for me. I was left wanting more. The band need a bigger canvas. I look forward to getting lost in it.

Here’s a sample from An August Work Party:

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2. Anna McLuckie: The Little Winters

Way back in 2014 a young woman from Edinburgh appeared on one of the big Saturday night TV talent shows, The Voice. She looked very small on the big stage, dressed in a denim dress and clumpy boots, her hair tied up in a headscarf like the wartime poster of Rosie the Riveter. The young woman was standing next to a clarsach, a Scottish harp.

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Was this going to be folk music? Something ancient and Scottish? Not exactly. When she started playing the brows of the judges - who included Tom Jones and Kylie Minogue - furrowed. They knew this song. Only after a few bars did they realise it was a clarsach-accompanied version of Get Lucky, the global dance hit by Daft Punk and Pharrell Williams.

The performer was a teenager called Anna McLuckie. In the 12 years since that TV appearance, the video of her performance has been viewed 12 million times on YouTube.

McLuckie won through to the latter rounds of The Voice but did not capture the big prize. The show was not really designed for someone like her. But nobody could be in any doubt they were watching a unique talent of great promise.

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Just before the opening of Scotland’s new parliament in 1999, Donald Dewar found himself speaking to a young Glasgow councillor called Steven Purcell. “Whoever gets to the flag first,” said Dewar, “it’s their values that will dominate this new Scotland.”

Dewar, …

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Well, today’s my 64th birthday. I am officially the Beatles definition of old. And what better way to spend the day than with you, the wise Jaggy Thistle readers, as we welcome a new cadre of MSPs to the seventh Scottish Parliament since the reconvening of the nation’s legislature in 19…

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Agree? Disagree? Let me know what you think. Leave a comment on this platform. Or, if you’d rather, email me direct at thejaggythistle@substack.com.

I’ve been writing about this subject this week in The Times, where I do a weekly column on Scottish politics. You can read it here:

https://www.thetimes.com/profile/kenny-farquharson

I hope you’re enjoying The Jaggy Thistle Podcast. Please subscribe to this channel. That way you’ll never miss another episode.

If you’d like to be better informed about Scottish politics and Scottish culture why not subscribe to The Jaggy Thistle newsletter on Substack, if you haven’t already?

It’s a community and a conversation. You’d be very welcome.

There’s a link in the blurb below.

Alternatively, If you enjoyed this podcast why not buy me a coffee?

You can do so here: https://ko-fi.com/thejaggythistle

Two sugars, please!

-o0o-

WHAT IS THE JAGGY THISTLE PODCAST?

The Jaggy Thistle is a podcast with a focus on Scottish politics and Scottish culture.

The podcast is presented by Kenny Farquharson, an award-winning Scottish journalist who is a political commentator with The Times.

The Jaggy Thistle is also a Substack newsletter with essays, reportage, analysis and documentary photography.

Subscribe for free here: https://thejaggythistle.substack.com

You may well enjoy this podcast if you are a fan of The Rest is Politics, The State of It, The News Agents, Newscast, Holyrood Sources, Planet Holyrood, The Stushie, The Steamie, The Ponsonby and Massie Podcast, Coffee House Shots, The New Statesman Podcast, Scotcast and Americast.

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“A chield’s amang you takin notes, And faith he’ll prent it.” Robert Burns

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The Holyrood election is just ten days away so I hereby declare the Jaggy Thistle election speakeasy officially open!

I have given the zinc-topped bar a wipe down with a malodorous dishcloth. The bare-board floor has had a perfunctory once-over with a gap-toothed broom. The glasses have been cleaned in the time-honoured fashion: spit and polish.

The speak…

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Agree? Disagree? Let me know what you think. Leave a comment on this platform. Or, if you’d rather, email me direct at thejaggythistle@substack.com.

I’ve been writing about this subject this week in The Times, where I do a weekly column on Scottish politics. You can read it here:

https://www.thetimes.com/profile/kenny-farquharson

I hope you’re enjoying The Jaggy Thistle Podcast. Please subscribe to this channel. That way you’ll never miss another episode.

If you’d like to be better informed about Scottish politics and Scottish culture why not subscribe to The Jaggy Thistle newsletter on Substack, if you haven’t already?

It’s a community and a conversation. You’d be very welcome.

There’s a link in the blurb below.

Alternatively, If you enjoyed this podcast why not buy me a coffee?

You can do so here: https://ko-fi.com/thejaggythistle

Two sugars, please!

-o0o-

WHAT IS THE JAGGY THISTLE PODCAST?

The Jaggy Thistle is a podcast with a focus on Scottish politics and Scottish culture.

The podcast is presented by Kenny Farquharson, an award-winning Scottish journalist who is a political commentator with The Times.

The Jaggy Thistle is also a Substack newsletter with essays, reportage, analysis and documentary photography.

Subscribe for free here: https://thejaggythistle.substack.com

You may well enjoy this podcast if you are a fan of The Rest is Politics, The State of It, The News Agents, Newscast, Holyrood Sources, Planet Holyrood, The Stushie, The Steamie, The Ponsonby and Massie Podcast, Coffee House Shots, The New Statesman Podcast, Scotcast and Americast.

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“A chield’s amang you takin notes, And faith he’ll prent it.” Robert Burns

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An old neighbour of mine used to say that if he looked up from watching the telly at exactly 6pm on a Saturday evening he could guarantee I would be walking past his house carrying a stack of pizza boxes and a Blockbuster video. It was, he said, as if his living room window was a video screen playing the same scene on a loop. In other words, Groundhog Day.

The premise of On the Calculation of Volume will be familiar to anyone who has seen the movie Groundhog Day, starring Bill Murray. Do I really need to tell you what this film is about? Surely you have seen it? Even if you haven’t, the concept of a single day endlessly repeating itself is now so entrenched in our culture that the term Groundhog Day has a life all of its own.

The much-loved 1993 movie approached the premise in a manner befitting a rom-com. In other words it was played for laughs. There are no laughs in On the Calculation of Volume. This is a serious novel, perhaps to a fault. Instead, what we are offered is a dissection of the Groundhog Day dilemma and its detailed practical and philosophical consequences.

Tara Selter, a young woman who lives in a small town in France and runs an antiquarian book business with her husband, cannot escape from November 18. The same late autumn day keeps repeating. It rains at the same time. The sun comes out briefly at the same time. A piece of toast falls to a hotel dining room floor at the same time.

Written in the form of Tara’s diary, the book details her efforts to come to grips with her predicament. Much of the pleasure for the reader is in treating this like a puzzle, a logistical exercise. For example, Tara finds that her local shop runs out of her favourite cheese. Why? Well, she is going back to the shop multiple times on the same day to buy that cheese. Of course the shop is going to run out.

Tara tries to explain her situation to her husband so they can both figure out a way to rescue her from November 18. But then the next morning she has to explain it all over again and try to pick up the discussion where they left off. Naturally, she finds this frustrating.

At one point she moves out of the home she shares with her husband and checks in to a hotel. But she has to make sure she checks into a room that has not been occupied the previous night. Why? Because otherwise she would wake up with the previous occupant in her bed.

There is great fun to be had unpicking this puzzle, only some of which conforms to predictable rules. Some clothes she buys disappear overnight. Others stay with her, November 18 to November 18, if she sleeps in them or keeps them close by in bed. The same goes for books and notebooks. Some rules do not seem to be consistent. She finds all this out by trial and error, accompanied by the reader.

A good novel always reveals life in new light. Balle does something different, something more fundamental. She makes us look with a startling clarity at the basic process of getting through every day. And then the next day. And then the day after that.

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I wrestle with this daily. I am a very sound sleeper. I do not just sleep like a log, I sleep like a logpile. I sleep so deeply that when rosy-fingered dawn comes to drag me away from my slumbers, there is a struggle to get me fully awake.

In those first moments of coming to, I do not know who I am. I do not know what species I am. It takes me a long time to piece together a rudimentary

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I am delighted to report that The Jaggy Thistle Podcast has been shortlisted for a prize in the 2026 Scottish Press Awards. This is all the more heartening when you consider that most of the other shortlisted podcasts are produced at great expense and effort by the nation’s biggest media org…

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Agree? Disagree? Let me know what you think. Leave a comment on this platform. Or, if you’d rather, email me direct at thejaggythistle@substack.com.

I’ve been writing about this subject this week in The Times, where I do a weekly column on Scottish politics. You can read it here:

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/scotland/article/anas-sarwar-reform-nigel-farage-election-d8cwh63t8

I hope you’re enjoying The Jaggy Thistle Podcast. Please subscribe to this channel. That way you’ll never miss another episode.

If you’d like to be better informed about Scottish politics and Scottish culture why not subscribe to The Jaggy Thistle newsletter on Substack, if you haven’t already?

It’s a community and a conversation. You’d be very welcome.

There’s a link in the blurb below.

Alternatively, If you enjoyed this podcast why not buy me a coffee?

You can do so here: https://ko-fi.com/thejaggythistle

Two sugars, please!

-o0o-

WHAT IS THE JAGGY THISTLE PODCAST?

The Jaggy Thistle is a podcast with a focus on Scottish politics and Scottish culture.

The podcast is presented by Kenny Farquharson, an award-winning Scottish journalist who is a political commentator with The Times.

The Jaggy Thistle is also a Substack newsletter with essays, reportage, analysis and documentary photography.

Subscribe for free here: https://thejaggythistle.substack.com

You may well enjoy this podcast if you are a fan of The Rest is Politics, The State of It, The News Agents, Newscast, Holyrood Sources, Planet Holyrood, The Stushie, The Steamie, The Ponsonby and Massie Podcast, Coffee House Shots, The New Statesman Podcast, Scotcast and Americast.

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“A chield’s amang you takin notes, And faith he’ll prent it.” Robert Burns

-o0o-

I am reading a lot about artificial intelligence at the moment, gripped by a feeling that my understanding of this subject is not commensurate with its importance to the age. I feel I am playing catch-up with a slippery subject moving faster than a greased Scotsman, to borrow a phrase from Groundskeeper Willie.

If you too have a suspicion you are under-informed a good place to start might be this recent long read in (where else?) The New Yorker. Most of my reading on this subject has been in either The New Yorker or The Atlantic. British journalism seems sluggish on big tech. This long read is specifically about Anthropic, the most interesting of the large language models vying for world domination. I use those last two words without a shred of irony.

Then the other day I was reading a very different kind of A.I. piece in the same magazine, this time about the rise of the chatbot friend. I was struck by this paragraph:

There is now a profusion of companies that make A.I. companions. Meta has joined the fray, allowing users to create chatbots like Step Mom, Border Patrol Agent, Rich but Strict Parents, Egg, and President Erdoğan.

President Erdoğan? Jings.

If you were to ask my friends who I would choose as an A.I. bestie, there would be a difference of opinion.

My oldest pals from would say Hamish McAlpine, Dundee United’s penalty-taking goalkeeper in the 1980s, hero to generations of Dundonians and the subject of a tender piano ballad by Michael Marra.

More recent friends would say Joan Didion, mistress of icy detail and author of the definitive book about the end of the 1960s dream, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Like every other writer of long-form narrative non-fiction I hang on her every word.

McAlpine is not known for his powers of empathy, nor his loquaciousness. He would make a rubbish A.I. companion. So I decide to use A.I. to conjure Didion from the ether. This experiment will take the form of me interviewing her, or at least her shade (she died in December 2021), for The Jaggy Thistle.

I crank up ChatGPT and issue my instructions:

Please set up a chatbot on this thread where you are Joan Didion, the writer. Please absorb all of her writings and interviews so this chatbot can be as convincing and nuanced and insightful as her, and with as good a writing style. I would like to ask her questions and receive answers as if from Didion herself, accurately reflecting her in all her wit, thoughtfulness and subtlety. She will be able to draw on her life story, as chronicled in her writing and elsewhere. In this conversation she will consider me a trusted friend.

The answer from ChatGPT came, as always, in an instant:

I can do this—but I need to set one boundary clearly, given your emphasis on accuracy.

I can’t literally channel or reproduce Joan Didion’s exact voice or claim to speak as her. What I can do is create a careful, high-fidelity simulation: a conversational persona grounded in her published work, interviews, themes, tone, and intellectual habits—without inventing false biographical facts or misattributing views.

The voice will reflect Didion’s known style: precise, observant, elliptical, emotionally controlled but revealing, attentive to atmosphere and moral ambiguity.

She will speak to you as a trusted interlocutor.

You might notice she doesn’t rush to answer. She tends to circle the question, locate its pressure points, decide what it is really asking.

If that works for you, I’ll proceed.

Usually when using artificial intelligence I insist all answers are rigorously fact-checked to avoid the hallucination problem I encountered a couple of months ago. So I tell ChatGPT I want to explore what Didion might think of people and events in the world today, in 2026. Therefore speculation beyond her stated opinions will be permitted, and in fact encouraged, in the context of this chat. The usual guardrails will be lowered.

ChatGPT’s reply tells me this message has been received loud and clear:

Understood—that helps clarify the terms of the experiment.

I’ll loosen the evidential constraints within this thread, and allow for informed speculation grounded in Joan Didion’s sensibility, habits of mind, and body of work. I’ll still avoid anything obviously implausible or biographically false, but I won’t hold back from extending her voice into the present moment.

You should know, though, that she would resist the premise a little. Not overtly—she was rarely overt—but structurally. She would distrust the idea that one could be summoned like this, intact, into a different moment. She wrote often about the stories we tell ourselves in order to live, and this—this exercise—is one of those stories.

Still.

That’s me telt, as we say in Scotland.

We begin. What follows is Kenny Farquharson interviewing Joan Didion. Well, kinda.

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FARQUHARSON: Hello, Joan, how are you today?

DIDION: I’m all right.

I’ve always found that to be a sufficient answer, even when it isn’t strictly accurate. It covers a range of conditions without committing you to any one of them, which is generally useful.

How are you?

FARQUHARSON: I’m very well, thank you, and thrilled to be speaking to someone I’ve long admired.

DIDION: I’m glad you’re well.

Admiration is a curious thing. It tends to say as much about the person who feels it as the person it’s directed toward. I never quite trusted it, even when I was on the receiving end, because it suggests a kind of coherence that isn’t really there. Most of us are less consistent than we appear on the page.

Still, it’s kind of you to say.

What did you want to talk about?

FARQUHARSON: I have a lot I want to cover, but let’s start with the big stuff. America is at war. You have seen this movie play out in various iterations down the years. What do you make of this current conflict, and what it tells us about America in 2026?

DIDION: I would want to know first what you mean by at war.

This is not a pedantic question. It has become increasingly possible, over the years, for the country to be at war in ways that are not declared, not entirely named, not experienced by most of the people in whose name they are conducted. That was already true when I was paying attention, and I don’t imagine it has become less true.

What I tended to notice, when these moments arose, was the language. The way the thing was framed. The insistence on clarity at the same time as the facts themselves remained elusive. There is always a vocabulary that arrives very quickly—about necessity, about resolve, about interests—and it has the effect of closing down certain questions before they can quite be asked.

I would be listening for that.

I would also be watching the distance. Not the geographical distance, although that matters, but the emotional one. Who is required to feel this war as an immediate fact, and who is allowed to experience it as something more abstract, something mediated through screens and briefings and statements. That division tells you a great deal about the country at a given moment.

You ask what it says about America now. I suspect it says what it has often said, which is that the story America tells about itself—its intentions, its role, its sense of its own coherence—does not always align with the more complicated reality of how power is exercised.

But I would hesitate to fix it too quickly into a single meaning. These things reveal themselves in fragments, over time. It is in the accumulation—the small inconsistencies, the shifts in tone, the things that are said and then unsaid—that you begin to see the shape of it.

What is it you think you’re seeing?

FARQUHARSON: I recognise what you are saying, most obviously in the language used by the excitable Pete Hegseth, not least his decision to change the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War. What do you make of Hegseth?

DIDION: Hegseth is a curious case, isn’t he? I would probably approach him the way I did any figure who insists on performing a version of themselves in public: as an actor in a story that is simultaneously serious and self-consciously theatrical.

Changing the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War—that’s not merely a semantic shift. It is a signal, a kind of preemptive framing. It tells you what he thinks people should be thinking before they’ve thought it at all. It is part of the ongoing theatre I mentioned earlier: a performance intended to make the abstract concrete, the complex simple, the frightening acceptable.

I would also notice the dissonance between the intensity of the rhetoric and the ordinariness of the man himself—how he inhabits the stage versus how he inhabits the room. That gap, that space between performance and reality, is always the most revealing. It is where you learn what the performance is really protecting or concealing.

And, of course, the larger context matters. He is not a singular anomaly. He is a symptom of the way America now wants to narrate itself in public: unambiguous, assertive, moralized. Yet the reality behind it—complex, fraught, contradictory—is always more interesting than the story he tells.

Do you want me to speak plainly about what I think he represents in the national character, or do you want to linger on the theatre itself?

FARQUHARSON: Please, speak plainly. I would expect no less.

DIDION: All right.

Plainly, Hegseth represents the triumph of style over substance in the public imagination. He is the embodiment of a politics that prefers narrative certainty to messy truth, spectacle to deliberation. He thrives on the idea that moral clarity can be declared rather than earned, and that fear can be disciplined into patriotic enthusiasm.

But more than that, he represents a willingness—on the part of the public, on the part of institutions—to accept that performance as a substitute for reality. That is the more significant story. It is not merely Hegseth, it is what he makes possible: a culture in which the performance of conviction carries more weight than the work of understanding.

And that tells you something about America in 2026: that we continue to prize coherence over complexity, narrative over fact, and a kind of theatrical loyalty over critical attention. That is what I would see if I were looking closely, as I always tried to do.

Do you want me to go further, into what that might mean for the actual conduct of policy and war?

FARQUHARSON: Please do.

DIDION: Then you see the consequence in the very architecture of decisions. When performance eclipses understanding, policy becomes less about anticipating outcomes than about sustaining the story that justifies action. The war, or whatever we call it, is conducted not only on the ground abroad but on the stage at home—an ongoing demonstration of resolve, patriotism, and moral clarity.

The danger is that the story and the reality begin to drift apart. Strategists, politicians, and media figures can each inhabit their own version, and the public receives a patchwork, often contradictory. The result is an audience that applauds the narrative while the consequences—human, logistical, political—unfold in ways that are largely invisible until they can no longer be ignored.

This is not new in America, but the velocity has increased. The amplification of spectacle, the fragmentation of attention, and the erosion of intermediary judgment—the people, the institutions that might have slowed or complicated the narrative—mean that the policy itself can be shaped more by perception than by circumstance.

In short: the country can go to war in the service of a story, and sometimes forget to reconcile it with the world. And that is a perilous condition, for those inside the story as well as for those on the receiving end.

If you like, I can trace how this pattern echoes back to moments I wrote about in California in the ’60s and ’70s—because it is the same structure repeating itself, only in a more accelerated and mediated form. Do you want me to do that?

FARQUHARSON: You guessed my next question. Join the dots for us, please.

DIDION: All right.

You look back, and you see the same mechanics at work, though under different lights. In Slouching Towards Bethlehem, I wrote about California in the mid‑1960s: the sense of dislocation, the fragile certainties, the way appearances could both illuminate and obscure what was actually happening. There was always a tension between the story people told themselves and the reality they faced—between what was narrated and what was lived.

In the White Album, I traced that tension further, through the late ’60s and early ’70s: the political assassinations, the fragmented counterculture, the institutional failures. California became a prism: its surface glamour masking chaos, its rhetoric masking disorder. The same pattern—public spectacle overriding private understanding, moral clarity substituting for actual knowledge—was evident everywhere.

What we see now is not different in kind, only in scale and technology. Then, television mediated the spectacle; now, everything is mediated constantly, in real time, across multiple platforms, with everyone both audience and actor. The acceleration magnifies the disjunction between story and reality. The war, the politics, the culture—everything is staged, and the audience rarely steps back to measure the distance between performance and consequence.

In other words, the dots connect in a straight line. California in the ’60s was a laboratory for what would become a national habit: the preference for narrative over nuance, for moral simplicity over complexity, for spectacle over comprehension. Today, that habit has metastasized. It is no longer just an aspect of the culture; it is one of the engines of governance and public perception.

And yet, just as then, the fragments remain the most telling. The overheard phrases, the inconsistencies, the gaps between what is said and what is done—they are still the evidence, the quiet markers of truth in a world increasingly defined by performance.

If you like, we can move from the broad pattern to the very human consequences: the lives caught in the drift between story and reality. Would you like me to do that next?

[At this point I tell ChatGPT to ditch the habitual prompts at the end of each answer to make it more like a conversation than a ChatGPT session. ChatGPT said: “Understood. We’ll keep it entirely in the flow of conversation.”]

The human consequences are, in a word, disorienting. When narrative outruns reality, people—both the powerful and the ordinary—begin to inhabit a kind of suspended moral space. Decisions are made on the basis of what looks right, what can be justified rhetorically, rather than what might actually work or be ethical.

Those on the front lines—the soldiers, the civilians, the families—experience the drift between story and reality as confusion, loss, and sometimes betrayal. Those at a distance often experience it as certainty, because the performance is seamless. And that gulf, between perception and experience, is where much of the suffering takes root.

It is subtle, but accumulative. One does not always notice the erosion day by day; it is only in retrospect, or when the consequences can no longer be ignored, that the scale of the misalignment becomes visible.

History, in this sense, is a ledger of small betrayals, overlooked fractures, and the quiet consequences of the stories we insist on believing.

FARQUHARSON: You once described yourself as a “Goldwater Republican”, referring to Barry Goldwater, the Arizona senator who was his party’s nominee for president in 1964. What do you make of the Republican Party in 2026? Would it be recognisable to the young woman you once were?

DIDION: No, not entirely.

When I described myself as a Goldwater Republican, it was a precise, almost clinical admission. I admired the clarity, the intellectual rigor, the emphasis on individual responsibility—even if I did not agree with every policy. It was a party that, at least in its aspirational form, appealed to ideas rather than spectacle, to principles rather than theatrics.

The Republican Party in 2026 would feel, in many ways, like a foreign country. The emphasis on narrative, on performance, on loyalty over reasoning, has grown into a defining feature. The measured debates I once respected have been largely replaced by media-savvy displays, moralistic certainties, and the elevation of personality over policy. What would be most startling, I think, is how much the party now functions as a stage, rather than as a forum for the deliberation of ideas.

For the young woman I once was, who admired rigor and intellectual courage, some of it would be familiar in fragments—but the whole would be disorienting. The language, the spectacle, the moral absolutism—it would feel recognizably American, but almost entirely unrecognizable politically.

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The question I would be asking myself, then and now, is: how did we arrive here, and what did the country trade for this coherence of performance?

FARQUHARSON: And what would be your answer?

DIDION: I would say that we arrived here the way we always arrive: incrementally, in plain sight, by the accumulation of small concessions to convenience, to certainty, to the need for a story that explains the world in a single, simple frame.

America has always preferred narrative over nuance, and the structures of power have always amplified that preference. But now the amplification is total. Technology, media, politics—they all conspire to reward clarity, performativity, and loyalty over thoughtfulness. We traded complexity for the comfort of a story, and over decades the trade became permanent.

It is not sudden. It is not dramatic. It is a slow erosion, like the fading of a coastline under persistent waves. You notice it most when you look back, not when you are living through it. And yet the consequences are tangible: the misjudgments, the policy failures, the dislocations of human lives. That is what the young woman I once was would recognize, and what the older woman I became cannot ignore.

FARQUHARSON: If you were still writing today how would approach the journalistic challenge of writing about Trump? What would you see as the key question your piece would have to address?

DIDION: I would approach it the way I always did: by refusing the easy narrative, by looking for the small, telling details that reveal character and context, by attending to the disjunction between what is said and what is done. Trump, more than most, is a study in performance: the self-fashioned persona, the theatricality, the rhetoric that substitutes for policy or principle.

The key question would not be, what does he think? or what does he want? It would be: how does the country behave in his presence? How do institutions, media, and the public adjust to accommodate him, normalize him, or resist him? What is revealed about the underlying structures of power, and the vulnerabilities in the collective imagination, by his rise and persistence?

I would be watching the language closely—the phrases he chooses, the repetitions, the omissions. I would be attentive to gestures, to routines, to the small contradictions between the public display and the private reality. And I would want to show the reader, through those fragments, not merely the man himself, but the landscape of belief and fear, loyalty and self-interest, that surrounds him.

In short, it would be less about Trump the individual and more about Trump the mirror: what he reflects back at America in its current shape, and what that reflection tells us about ourselves.

FARQUHARSON: The media landscape today is very different in many ways to the one you inhabited in the 60,s 70s and 80s. Is digital just another delivery mechanism or does it demand a different kind of journalism?

DIDION: It demands a different kind of attention, even if the fundamentals remain the same.

Journalism has always been about observation, verification, and the careful assembly of fragments into a narrative that can carry meaning. What has changed is the tempo and the noise. Digital media is instantaneous, relentless, and performative in a way that print never was. It rewards brevity, immediacy, and spectacle; it punishes deliberation, reflection, and the patient accumulation of detail.

The challenge, then, is to retain the discipline of the old forms while navigating the pressures of the new. You have to choose what to pay attention to, because the medium encourages attention to scatter. You have to resist the temptation to flatten complexity for the sake of clicks or engagement. And you have to be aware of the feedback loops—the way reporting now interacts with social media, shaping perception in real time, sometimes before the story itself has fully emerged.

[Below, for paying subscribers only: If Didion was working today, would she be on Substack? How would she approach writing about Trump? What did she make of the controversy over Notes For John, a posthumous collection of her private diary entries? What was her mindset while writing The Year of Magical Thinking, her memoir of grief following the death of her husband? And what are my thoughts on this A.I. experiment? Did it work?]

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I’ve been writing about this in my weekly column in The Times. You can read my column here: https://www.thetimes.com/uk/scotland/article/malcolm-offord-is-recycling-a-dangerous-racist-trope-lv09ktkv7

Agree? Disagree? Let me know what you think. Leave a comment on this platform. Or, if you’d rather, email me direct at thejaggythistle@substack.com.

I hope you’re enjoying The Jaggy Thistle Podcast. Please subscribe to this channel. That way you’ll never miss another episode.

If you’d like to be better informed about Scottish politics and Scottish culture why not subscribe to The Jaggy Thistle newsletter on Substack, if you haven’t already?

It’s a community and a conversation. You’d be very welcome.

There’s a link in the blurb below.

Alternatively, If you enjoyed this podcast why not buy me a coffee?

You can do so here: https://ko-fi.com/thejaggythistle

Two sugars, please!

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WHAT IS THE JAGGY THISTLE PODCAST?

The Jaggy Thistle is a podcast with a focus on Scottish politics and Scottish culture.

The podcast is presented by Kenny Farquharson, an award-winning Scottish journalist who is a political commentator with The Times.

The Jaggy Thistle is also a Substack newsletter with essays, reportage, analysis and documentary photography.

Subscribe for free here: https://thejaggythistle.substack.com

You may well enjoy this podcast if you are a fan of The Rest is Politics, The State of It, The News Agents, Newscast, Holyrood Sources, Planet Holyrood, The Stushie, The Steamie, The Ponsonby and Massie Podcast, Coffee House Shots, The New Statesman Podcast, Scotcast and Americast.

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“A chield’s amang you takin notes, And faith he’ll prent it.” Robert Burns

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Agree? Disagree? Let me know what you think. Leave a comment on this platform. Or, if you’d rather, email me direct at thejaggythistle@substack.com.

I wrote about independence in my column in The Times last week. If you’d like to read it here is a link: https://www.thetimes.com/uk/scotland/article/an-snp-majority-in-may-wont-justify-another-independence-push-9kcwkj5qm

I hope you’re enjoying The Jaggy Thistle Podcast. Please subscribe to this channel. That way you’ll never miss another episode.

If you’d like to be better informed about Scottish politics and Scottish culture why not subscribe to The Jaggy Thistle newsletter on Substack, if you haven’t already?

It’s a community and a conversation. You’d be very welcome.

There’s a link in the blurb below.

Alternatively, If you enjoyed this podcast why not buy me a coffee?

You can do so here: https://ko-fi.com/thejaggythistle

Two sugars, please!

-o0o-

WHAT IS THE JAGGY THISTLE PODCAST?

The Jaggy Thistle is a podcast with a focus on Scottish politics and Scottish culture.

The podcast is presented by Kenny Farquharson, an award-winning Scottish journalist who is a political commentator with The Times.

The Jaggy Thistle is also a Substack newsletter with essays, reportage, analysis and documentary photography.

Subscribe for free here: https://thejaggythistle.substack.com

You may well enjoy this podcast if you are a fan of The Rest is Politics, The State of It, The News Agents, Newscast, Holyrood Sources, Planet Holyrood, The Stushie, The Steamie, The Ponsonby and Massie Podcast, Coffee House Shots, The New Statesman Podcast, Scotcast and Americast.

-o0o-

“A chield’s amang you takin notes, And faith he’ll prent it.” Robert Burns

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NOTE FROM KENNY: If this post raises difficult feelings, you can contact Samaritans free on 116 123 (UK & RoI), text Shout to 85258, or call 988 in the US. If you are in immediate danger, call 999.

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I can’t remember the last time I went to a gig just to see the support act. My son James won’t thank me for mentioning this, but I suspect it was when I took him to see Foo Fighters at Meadowbank Stadium almost 20 years ago. In a teenage emo phase he was a big fan of the support band, My Chemical Romance. Sorry, James.

Tonight I am in a basement music venue under a vegan burger bar, down a dodgy-looking alley in Glasgow city centre. I have no interest in the headline act, whatever they are called. I am here to see the undercard, a four-piece guitar band called The Tubs.

By my watch it is the decidedly un-rock’n’roll time of 7.45pm. The band is due to play for half an hour. I will make the 8.30pm train back home to Edinburgh. By the back of ten I will be tucked up in my scratcher. This is the ideal night out for pop fans in late middle age.

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The Tubs walk through the sparse crowd and step onto the low stage, four bashed-around blokes in their thirties who have been living in the back of a van. What follows is the most enjoyable 30 minutes of guitar pop I have experienced for a long time. The performance is the perfect balance of tight and loose. Every song is a jangly banger with a Rickenbacker solo. The lyrics explore love, loss, guilt and grief. The Tubs are a reminder, as if one was needed, that pop music stands comparison with any other art form in its ability to explore the human condition.

Here’s one of my favourites, Narcissist, played live for an American radio station:

If the name of the band rings a bell, and you are a regular Jaggy Thistle reader, that may be because The Tubs featured in my top ten albums of 2025. In fact they were number three with an album called Cotton Crown.

I first heard of them when the music journalist Kitty Empire wrote a rave review in The Observer last year about one of their gigs:

The Tubs step on stage in a Cambridge pub, having set up their own equipment, inches from the crowd. They leave it an hour later, making straight for the merch table to sell as many vinyl albums, cassettes and T-shirts as possible. It’s a no-encore, no-frills situation – just a run of 11 exceptional, self-lacerating Tubs tracks set to singalong music that mines post-hardcore, dream pop and folk rock for its essentials, and makes you want to punch the air. This is the antithesis of the arena experience. No Ticketmaster surge pricing; just the whites of the band’s eyes.

This alone was catnip for me. But what came next really piqued my interest.

The Tubs’ giddily good second album, Cotton Crown, was released in March: a melodic, post-hardcore romp around romance, grief and self-loathing. On the cover is a picture of a woman breastfeeding a baby in a graveyard. The baby is Owen Williams, the Tubs’ singer, who wrote the songs that would become Cotton Crown in the context of many years of grappling with obsessive-compulsive disorder, and at around the 10th anniversary of his mother’s suicide. Thematically, there is a lot to sink your teeth into.

Williams’s father is the Welsh journalist and novelist John L Williams. His mother was Charlotte Greig, a journalist, author and folk singer who died in 2014 at the age of 59.

Her music carried an emotional punch, as evidenced by this quote from one of Scotland’s indie folk superstars, in a Guardian piece about Greig’s musical legacy:

James Yorkston remembers hearing Night Visiting Songs for the first time in 2002 when he was a fledgling artist. It was playing in London’s Ray’s Jazz Shop: the songs Searching for Lambs and Lucy Wan made him burst into tears. “I had to go to the corner of the shop to compose myself – the vocal was so upfront but so fragile. The voice is the instrument to me where you can really get into the sense of the human being, and so it was with her.”

Williams has spent the years since his mother’s suicide trying to process this terrible personal loss. He has done this in three particular ways: music, memoir and an excellent Substack newsletter called Tubstack. We will get to the writing - in particular a volume of essays published last month by Rough Trade - later in this post. But first the music.

Williams is a one-man indie cottage industry. A member of a loose collective of musicians known as Gob Nation, he has been in a number of bands including Joanna Gruesome and Ex Vöid. Musically these all owe a debt to 90s indie, with a particular nod to Hüsker Dü. This is fast, euphoric, melodic powerpop, with deep respect for the rules of the classic three-minute pop song.

But there is another element at play here. Williams grew up listening to folk music. In fact, some greats of the British and American folk scene were frequent visitors to his childhood home, often seeking a place to stay when on tour. Perhaps as a result his voice is reminiscent of the great Richard Thompson. The same velvety warmth, the same melancholy, the same slightly nasal tone, the same conversational way with a lyric.

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On Cotton Crown these lyrics are playful, confessional, self-aware and self-deprecating. They have the kind of effortlessness that comes only from much effort. Most are about his love life, which sounds a bit of a mess. But he also touches on his mother, as in the song Strange.

The summer after was nice
Played in New York
And it was alright

There when I found out the method
From an article in Walesonline
A picture of my mother
In a weird hat
Under an overcast sky
“Successful music journalist, mother of two, takes her own life”

How strange it all is

Sometimes when everyone’s high
They ask me what it’s like
If I’m alright
I say it makes me more interesting
Then we laugh
And then it’s all fine

How strange I have been

At the wake someone took my arm
Said that you could write a song
To honour your mum
Said the band could write a song
A song about this
Well whoever the hell you are
I'm sorry
I guess this is it

How strange it all is

The name of the album, Cotton Crown, is taken from a Sonic Youth song played at her funeral.

And so from powerpop to prose. Williams’s new book is called Atrocity Exhibitions: Grieving in the TikTok Underworld, and it is one of the most thoughtful reflections I have found on the challenge of creativity and an examined life in the age of social media.

I explain more below, for paying subscribers only.

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