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A few years ago I wrote a lyric with my young daughter in mind. It’s from the perspective of a parent hoping their child won’t repeat their mistakes. Over 4 years later, my daughter – now 10 – has left a comment on the song on YouTube. I love all your songs, especially this one!… [more]
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I wrote a piece for Metro about the religious right’s wedge strategy to roll back equal rights legislation. The religious right knows it lost the equal marriage battle. But it thinks it can win the war against LGBT equality and women’s rights by using trans people as a proxy. Scratch an anti-trans bill, of which… [more]
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Writing about it, I mean. As the annual Bad Sex literary awards and Justin Timberlake’s new album demonstrate, it’s very easy to write about sex very badly. Here’s Pitchfork on Timberlake: Sauce invites you to imagine a partner’s “pink†pressing up against Timberlake’s “purple.â€Â The title track features this charming depiction of foreplay: “But then your… [more]
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Like many people, I have a personal Twitter account. And like many writers, that personal Twitter account is often used by people who want to contact me for work reasons. Luckily for me I’m not a young woman journalist, because if I were that means my personal Twitter account would be full of rape threats,… [more]
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I know what people want to read about: while this is supposedly a blog about me, bad jokes, technology and music, the most popular post I’ve ever published here is a post I wrote 13 years ago about a defrosting plate. I laughed the other day when I saw a Kickstarter campaign for one, presumably by… [more]
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I was chatting with a comedian pal about comedy last night: we both went to see Chris Rock last week, and it turns out we’ve been to a lot of the same comedy shows over the years. One of the things we talked about was Rock’s rage, where he’d take things out of the audience’s… [more]
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I’ve been chatting with Common Space editor and Sunday Herald columnist Angela Haggerty about a recent barney in Scottish political twitter: some of it has descended into a trans/anti-trans argument where everybody’s shouting at everybody else and nobody’s listening to anybody. As she wrote on Twitter, wishing people would “please stop ripping each other apart”:… [more]
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I took the kids to see the latest Pixar movie, Coco, yesterday. It’s a great film with a typically Pixar emotional punch (yes, I cried) and some truly exceptional CG, and it’s notable for being set in Mexico and based on Mexican folklore. It’s interesting to discover what went on away from the computers. The… [more]
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The Green MSP Patrick Harvie has always struck me as a good man. He was namechecked in an anti-trans piece in Scots newspaper The National yesterday, a piece that dragged up the usual “trans people are silencing women” bullshit and accused Harvie of not listening to women. Harvie responded on the Scottish Greens website. It’s… [more]
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This is a blast: from the previously mentioned Professor Batty, a blog about guitars he’s owned over the years. Discover what happened when Gibson lost its collective mind, what a “demented” guitar that shouldn’t exist is actually like to play and why he’s still got bits of the worst guitar ever made. Guitars are odd… [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.
