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A beautiful, sad piece by CJ Hauser in The Paris Review. There are worse things than not receiving love. There are sadder stories than this. There are species going extinct, and a planet warming. I told myself: who are you to complain, you with these frivolous extracurricular needs? [more]
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I was having a bad day on Saturday so I went to the pub to cheer myself up. It wasn’t entirely successful. First, a young woman who’d been standing next to me at the bar heard me speak, turned, and stared at me with open disgust. A few minutes later a drunk thirtysomething man put… [more]
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A lovely piece by Leslie Jamison about attending weddings. Everyone talks about weddings as beginnings but the truth is they are also endings. They give a horizon of closure to things that have been slowly dissolving for years: flirtations, friendships, shared innocence, shared rootlessness, shared loneliness. [more]
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I’ve written before about the toothless press regulator IPSO, which was set up by the press specifically for the purpose of not regulating the press. To take just one recent example, IPSO found that when The Times makes up quotes, doing so doesn’t breach the rules on accuracy. The ruling was on a story about… [more]
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Jess Brammar writes about another curse of the internet: reply guys. …alongside the straightforward abuse that is by now publicly acknowledged – and to the majority of the population, wholly unacceptable – there is something more complex, less offensive, but incredibly exhausting nonetheless. Sometimes it’s so subtle you barely notice it but it’s always there, always… [more]
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Another day, another great piece on Longreads. This one’s by Laura Lippman, best-selling crime writer, in Longreads’ series about ageing. I think when life gives you petit lemons, you should make lemonade — and refuse to share it with people who treat you rudely. [more]
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This is a bottle of Rimmel’s Oh My Gold nail polish, which I’m currently sporting. My five-year-old son likes it too, because nail polish is fun and fun is important. So when he asked for some on his own nails last night I was happy to oblige. This morning, he asked me to take it… [more]
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The heart always skips a beat when a famous person’s name appears in Twitter’s “trending” chart. It usually means they’ve died or been implicated in sex offences. So when Rod Liddle turned up the other night, my immediate reaction was to wonder whether he’d punched another pregnant woman in the stomach. Thankfully no: he was… [more]
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One of the things anti-trans writers like to go on about is the spectre of “detransition” and surgical regret: according to them, trans-related surgeries are acts of mutilation that many people will go on to regret. As ever, the facts tell a very different story. I’ve mentioned previously that the NHS in England reported a… [more]
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This is my daughter on stage with The Red Bricks, one of the bands formed at this year’s Girls Rock Glasgow summer school. She’s the one with arms aloft. Sorry about the picture quality, it’s from a video. The concert is the culmination of the nine-day event during which girls aged 7 to 16 form… [more]
Read me in books
My debut memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, was a Scotsman book of the year and Damian Barr’s Literary Salon book of the week, and it was shortlisted for the 2023 British Book Awards book of the year in the Discover category.
My latest book, Small Town Joy, is a celebration of queer influences on and queer artists in Scots music and is out now.
I’m also a contributor to the excellent anthology Fierce Salvage, which is also out now.
