I was discussing the pros and cons of keeping chickens in a communal Glasgow tenement backyard this afternoon and though neither side outweighed the other it turns out that it isn’t really in your own hands, whether you can have them or not, but instead it is up to your bloody neighbours. Chicken shit can be smelly but they are a very useful and often endearing fowl. So I got irritated, as you may expect, at the impossibility of a collective to challenge their comfort floodgates. ... there is more to this article, click to read the more »

I’ve been on holiday again. Completely absent from what is usually my reality. And I didn’t even have to leave the city. It seems funny that you can vanish so completely from a place that normally seems so small, where everybody knows everybody and a day doesn’t go by that you don’t bump into an acquaintance or friend unexpectedly – typically when you are looking exceptionally rough and are in a hurry and probably in some sort of pain which makes your salutary smile look twisted and morbid hence deepening the sense of social paranoia that we all seem to suffer from. ... there is more to this article, click to read the more »