Page 7 - Malcolm Boyd News Today

Blue blood blues

OUR renewed freedom to hug reminds Gilbert MacKay, from Newton Mearns, of a university class where one of his fellow students was called Fred, while…

Crackpot castingGLASGOW rock star Bobby Gillespie has rather surprisingly revealed he wants the Italian actress Monica Bellucci to play him if a…

IN the era before email, unlucky teachers sometimes discovered a slip of paper in their staffroom dookit. This form was known as a YUFTI, which translated as: "Yufti take another class". The necessary details began with the expression ‘please take’. Teacher Gordon Fisher from Stewarton recalls one Monday morning when there had been a terrible outbreak of hangovers (sorry, serious illness), and a frazzled depute was frantically trying to cover classes. Gordon didnt ease the depute’...

The Paris Review: The Flagellants, the American writer Carlene Hatcher Polite’s debut novel, is one of those out-of-print books that’s been lurking in the corner of my eye for the past few years. First published by Christian Bourgois éditeur as  Les Flagellants in Pierre Alien’s 1966 French translation, and then in its original English the following year by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, the book details the stormy relationship between Ideal and Jimson, a Black couple in New York City. The...

PREMIUM Reader Scott Williamson says it’s debatable whether he would want to take a stroll down this path. Family fun HOW does a chap explain to curious dog walkers strolling past his house that there is an entirely reasonable explanation why a masked man, wearing a buxomly stuffed bra, is visible through his front room window? Donald Munro – who lives in the house, and also happened to be the fellow in the mask (and bra) – tells the Diary that he was trying on a costume for his part ...

PREMIUM Doug Maughan spotted this shop front in Leh, Ladakh. “It appears to be a messy joint,” he notes. THE Diary was sad to hear of the Duke of Edinburgh’s death. He was an often irascible, yet eminently relatable chap. Reader Stuart Swanston recalls that when Prince Philip was Chancellor of Edinburgh University in the 1970s he opened a new building in the Zoology Department. After unveiling a plaque he was shown round the labs, where he noticed a molecular biologist who, being an a...

PREMIUM DUMBARTON reader John Sim noticed this sign on a local fence. Clearly some forms of discrimination are acceptable, even in our increasingly tolerant society. A jagged edge GLASGOW crime writer Graeme Macrae Burnet is a talented page scribbler, though he is now itching to prove that he also has exceptional entrepreneurial skills at his disposal. “Im thinking of opening a pub called The Vaccinated Arms,” he reveals. Lost in translation CELEBRITY hairdresser Denise McAdam, who is...

Shop strop

PREMIUM Maurice Bruce spotted this house, which he believes could use a lick of paint. Or better yet, some weapons-grade face cream Sign of class IAN Pattison, the legendary creator of Rab C Nesbitt, has been recalling one of his personal heroes, Liverpool footballer Ian St John, who died this week. “As a kid I sent my autograph book to him at Liverpool, hoping for his signature,” says Ian. “About a week later the book arrives back in an envelope reeking of wintergreen. Hed passed the b...